


Somniloquy

by gwyneth rhys (gwyneth)



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Novel, POV Third Person Omniscient, Saving the World, Scoobie Gang, Sleepwalking, Spike Saves Dawn, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-10-11
Updated: 2002-10-20
Packaged: 2017-11-27 12:10:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 49,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/661851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyneth/pseuds/gwyneth%20rhys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Spike had saved Dawn at the end of The Gift? And would saving her have altered his future as well as Buffy's -- and would they know it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Inanition

With a little courage, in time  
You might forgive me  
With a little loving, in time  
You might forgive me

- _-Dot Allison, Tomorrow Never Comes_

Here's the catch about saving the world: If you do it right, no one will notice. No thanks or praise; the world just goes on as it always has, none the wiser for being so close to ending. The people continuing on their daily journeys won't know that walking beside them is the one who intervened to save them from annihilation. They can't thank you, because you gave them a gift they don't know they received.

***

The tower loomed ceremoniously above the south end of town, dwarfing the warehouses and industrial buildings around where it stood, shining blue and silver in the night. The wind whipped across the platform at the top, leaving it creaking and groaning as if complaining about its poor craftsmanship. Beneath, a small battle raged and the sound carried far above to the platform, mingling with the noise of the whining metal.

Spike stepped lightly up on the top rung, almost bouncing, and saw the Niblet bound back like an animal to slaughter, wearing some kind of strange Renaissance-Faire getup. In front of her, waving a rather large blade, was that creepy little Doc fellow. And he was blabbing at Dawn, just twining on like there wasn't a world-ending crisis going on beneath them. If there was one thing Spike hated, it was a talking killer. "I'm going to kill you, and when I kill you, you'll be dead, and here's how I'm going to kill you, and why, and the reason you never saw it coming," and on and on ad nauseum. Well, all right, he hated many things more than talking killers, but they were right up there on the list -- at least in the top ten. Doc turned when he heard Spike behind him.

"Doesn't a fella stay dead when you kill him?" Spike sneered.

"Look who's talking," Doc answered lightly.

"C'mon, Doc, let's you and me have a go."

"Well... I do have a prior appointment..."

Really, he disliked this bug-eyed little git intensely. The casual wiseguy routine was irritating and boring; not a good combo as far as Spike was concerned. Dawn implored Spike to help her, as if he'd just stopped by for tea and a chat, as if he wasn't aware that the future of the world hinged on this moment. The fellow was still nattering at him but he'd stopped paying attention. Spike moved quickly, grabbing the blade from Doc's hands just as his disgusting frog tongue sprang out. Dodging swiftly to the left, Spike caught the blade on his arm as it ripped through coat, skin, and muscle tissue. He reached out, still strong through the pain, and grabbed the toad in a headlock. Doc twisted his head around and looked with black eyes at him.

"Tell you what. Help me out here, and I'll make sure she knows. You'll be rewarded. You're a smart fellow, what do you say?"

Shrugging, Spike answered, "How 'bout a sucking chest wound instead?"

He spun Doc around, brought the blade up into his chest and hit him with an elbow to the face, sending him flying off the platform. All nice and clean like. Spike looked down for a moment to make sure the body wasn't moving and saw the chaos beneath them, all the little Scoobies running hither and yon, Buffy taking on Glory. He should be down there helping her. But this was where he belonged, since he couldn't hurt the loonies who were acting as Glory's defenders. He turned to Dawn.

She was even more frightened now, eyes huge and breath coming in shallow gulps. Spike untied her, murmuring nonsense syllables to calm her down. It wasn't over yet. There was always the possibility that Buffy was losing her fight down below, so the poor little thing had a right to be scared. As he undid the last rope she threw herself into his arms, nearly knocking him off balance. "Careful!" he barked at her. "You about sent me off the edge and then we'd both be splattered all over the tarmac."

All he got was an armful of Summers and her hair in his mouth and her fingers clutching at him so hard they'd leave bruises. "Spike!" she cried, over and over.

"It's all right, Niblet. It's all right, he's gone." He stroked her hair. Bloody Summers women, he was in love with the lot of them and it pissed him off. It was hard to keep your humans-are-food detachment when just a word or a glance or a kind gesture from one of them reduced you to jelly. Spike picked her up and carried her in his arms. She barely weighed an ounce. He started carefully down the rungs that passed for stairs on this contraption, Dawn's arms fast around his neck.

"I'm sorry I was mean to you before, I'll never turn my back on you again. I'm so sorry, Spike." Dawn had expected Buffy to rescue her, but if she had to pick a pinch-hitter, it would be Spike -- even after everything that had happened. She clung to him, his strength and power the balm she needed, his gruffness the right potion for her terror. Dawn was almost afraid to ask him about her sister; if he was the one rescuing her, then Buffy must be in trouble. Sobbing into his neck, she said "I'm sorry" again, and he made a huffing noise in his throat. "Buffy?" she asked.

"Taking on the big guns. I just happened to be free. She'll be here in no time." He was thudding down the stairs and Dawn bounced in his arms. The smell of his leather coat and cigarette smoke was comforting, which was strange because she didn't like the smell of either very much at all.

"She'll be so grateful. And we treated you so bad." She thought about getting down and walking the rest of the way herself, because he was still in terrible shape from the torture and the burns, cuts, and bruises. All for her. But she couldn't find her legs, could only hold on to Spike as if he was her savior. He hated that kind of sentimental stuff, though.

Dawn sniffled and Spike looked at her face all moist with tears and snot running every which way. It would be disgusting if it wasn't so endearing.

"You can quit banging on about that. It doesn't matter." How long were these bloody stairs, anyway? Christ, why did evil always entail such elaborate schemes? Why couldn't anyone just sit in an armchair and dole out the evil without going to such lengths?

"No, I was mean to you and you saved me, we were all mean to you because of Buffy. But you saved me anyway even though you should hate me."

Snorting derisively, he said, "That'll never happen." He stopped and put her down. "I'm a bit knackered here. Let me catch my breath. So to speak."

She still clung to him like a limpet. All the times he'd fantasized in great detail about something just like this, now here it was, only with the wrong Summers. He picked her up again, arms, chest, and stomach still aching from Glory's brutal torture not so long ago, and continued on, listening to the endless stream of self-recrimination by Dawn that was occasionally punctuated by sniffling.

When they got to the bottom all the fighting had stopped and the minions had scarpered. The entire gang was standing around breathlessly, and Buffy was just starting to ascend the structure. She stopped hard, her mouth open, still in full battle mode -- always tough to stop when you got going, like a runaway train.

Buffy stared up at him holding Dawn, who was looking none the worse for wear, just awfully moist. Dawn clutched him tight. Spike really had saved the day. Buffy hadn't expected it, not really, but here he was with the key, and there Glory lay behind them, undone. No portal to an evil dimension anywhere in sight.

Buffy thought in astonishment, Spike saving the world -- what's wrong with this picture? She reached for Dawn, but Dawn only clutched Spike harder than ever and continued crying. So Buffy did the only thing she could and put her arms around them both, resting her cheek against Dawn's while they both cried. Spike was probably enjoying this way too much and would make a huge deal of it later, but for now she didn't care so much. And anyway, he deserved it.

Behind her, Xander made a little "hrm-hrmmm" sound. She turned her head slightly but didn't respond, then laughed when Spike said, "Do you mind? We're having a moment, here."

Wiping away tears, Buffy smiled as she drew back from them. Finally Dawn let go. Buffy noticed, though, that he still clutched her hand, their fingers entwined. She stared at Spike. Still slightly bruised from the torture, standing there in his long black coat, attached to her sister, having done the job and then some. For a heartbeat in his shining eyes there was some type of connection there, something human in him, and she loved him just a little for being so good.

Then the rest of her friends swarmed around them laughing and crying (mostly Anya, sobbing loudly and insisting they were tears of joy), and Tara was back to normal, and Giles had taken his glasses off and was pinching the bridge of his nose to stop from crying, and that fleeting connection to Spike was gone. When she turned back to him he was walking away, the bright whiteness of his peroxided hair fading last as he receded into the crowd of stunned and confused people. Buffy hesitated, wanting to stop him from melting into the darkness and away from them. She should have let him know he was welcome to stay, but the relief and joy of her friends froze her in place.

 

 

"Spike should be here," Dawn said for the one-hundredth time. They were all sitting in Buffy's living room, not so much celebrating as decompressing, trying to take in the idea that it was now over at last. Giles looked pained every time Dawn repeated the phrase. Quiet music played on the stereo while Xander and Anya danced together -- mostly they just shoved their bodies together and shifted from foot to foot -- while on the couch Willow lay with her head on Tara's lap. After all this time taking care of Tara, Willow was finally able to rest. Buffy was so relieved to see them at peace.

"I know, Dawn," Buffy said, "but I think he felt uncomfortable. You don't know how hard it is for everyone to accept him, for him to accept us."

"Yes, I do," Dawn said earnestly. "But they *have* to accept him now."

Buffy shrugged at Giles and nodded her head in the direction of the kitchen. "I'm going to get some more root beer. You want a refill?" Dawn petulantly handed her the glass. Buffy was glad to see that nearly dying and being tormented by Glory/Ben had left such an indelible mark and made her so much more enchanting. It would be nice to be able to recover like that, get over nearly having your life stolen from you and sending the world into a horrifying hell dimension. As if it were nothing more than a trip to the mall.

In the dark kitchen Giles glanced at Buffy while he fussed with cleaning up the mess. He still felt too keyed up -- oh, there was a bad pun, indeed \-- by the events tonight and that brought out his fusty side. Pottering was a time-honored English tradition in the aftermath of calamity. He should really go home, he knew, and let the kids be kids, but... there had been such unspeakable things tonight. Being in each other's company would be the only way they could get through it. He watched Buffy as she drummed out the bass line of the song with her fingertips. Giles could never tell her that he'd put the finishing touches on Ben, had killed another human deliberately for her. When she'd gone for Dawn, Buffy had left a non-human and hadn't known about the human form reappearing. If Ben had appeared when she was fighting... well, Buffy wouldn't have been able to end it all.

"So it seems that Spike has saved the day." Giles tried not to let his peevishness show, but it came out nonetheless.

"It would seem so indeed," Buffy mocked him, terribly. After all these years she still couldn't do even a halfway decent English accent.

"After all this time and all we've been through dealing with Glory and enduring his vileness, in the end he rose to the occasion."

"Yup." Buffy looked at him from under her brows. "Makes it hard to hate him and be disgusted with him, doesn't it? Dawn's completely wacked over him, too, even though she denied still having a crush on him." She looked hard at Giles. "And it's not like you slacked on the job today, either, mister. I don't know what I would have done without all of you."

"It's what makes you unique, Buffy," he said, smiling at her with a warm paternal glow. These days he took every chance to give the warm paternal glow. "You've maintained your life, your friends, despite all obstacles, and you've succeeded where possibly no one else could have because of that."

"Aw, go on," she smirked.

"Buffy, you did the unimaginable tonight. In a way we all did, under your direction. You've grown so much as a leader."

"Hoo-ah, Rangers all the way."

Taking his glasses off, Giles chuckled. "You *are* an excellent tactician and leader. And you should take credit for that."

But she was quickly grim again. "I couldn't lose her, Giles. I just couldn't. I can't lose any more people." Maybe that even extended to Spike right now. "I have never been so scared in my life."

"Well, it's a sign of your maturity that you soldiered on and got through it with only one little lapse. I've been thinking, Buffy, for a long time, that you've outgrown my help."

"No! No, I have not. No growing!" She thought suddenly of one of her favorite books when she was young, Higglety Pigglety Pop or There Must Be More to Life. The baby that wouldn't eat, refused to grow, and shouted "No!" all the time. When told by the dog nanny to eat so she could grow and not to shout, the baby had hollered "No eat! No grow! Shout!" It was tempting, but if she yelled anything like that at Giles right now, he'd probably have her committed.

It was obvious where he was going with this. For a long time she'd had the vague feeling he was planning to leave. If they'd played out this whole last big battlefield scene, well, then, what would stop him from going? Only her. *No grow. Shout.*

"This is a party, Giles, to celebrate. Or, well, maybe not a party so much as a how the hell did we do that wake-like gathering. But. Ding dong, the witch is dead, and now we sing and dance." She looked over her shoulder, hoping Willow wasn't around to hear that. "Let's go back in and celebrate."

When they got to the living room Dawn was flinging herself off the couch at Spike, who had just arrived. Buffy hadn't even heard the door open, though the music wasn't loud. Sneaky vampire types. Suddenly Spike was covered in Dawn as she squealed "Spike!" over and over. Time to put the smackdown on her little sister, Buffy thought, though it was hard to begrudge her these feelings. Dawn had every right to look at Spike as her knight in shining armor. So did Buffy, really. But the kid really needed to stop with the full-body contact.

"Hello, Spike, we're glad you're here," Buffy said. There was a forced nod from Giles off to her left. Xander made a strangling noise. "We're *all* glad," she added pointedly.

Spike looked at her through half-closed eyes that glittered with disbelief. He peeled Dawn off and flopped down on the couch, pulling a bottle out of the deep pocket of his coat. "Didn't know if it would be BYOB or not." Dawn cuddled up close to him and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

Just a few weeks ago the whole group had shut him out, even the Niblet. Then when they couldn't handle it all it was "if you please, Spike, help us save her, help us save us." It wasn't that he was a reluctant hero. It was simply that he didn't know which way to play the hand that was being dealt him -- Spike realized he had a royal flush, but should he bet his way to the bigger pot and keep the game going as long as possible, or show his hand early? Just how far could he go with it?

Did they even understand what was different? How much had happened? They were grudgingly thanking him and muttering behind their hands, pretending things hadn't changed. Well, sod them all, then. He'd just hang with the Little Bit and bask in the sunshine of her love, wait to see how big the pot got before he took it all.

Buffy brought him a plate of hot wings -- she'd remembered, he thought stupidly and wondered if she'd got them in on the off chance he'd come round the house. Spike caught a little eyebrow furrow from Giles behind her. As if she was doing just what he'd told her not to do. So they'd all been talking about him, Spike realized. Poor babies. Having to figure out a way to cope with the fact that he'd helped them. Just imagine the concern crawling about in the Watcher's brain like a worm, all that anxiety over whether Buffy would take up with him.

They all talked and chattered among themselves, rewinding and replaying the night's events over and over. When they got to the part about Buffy leaving Glory dying on the ground, Spike noticed that Giles twitched a little. That was interesting. When they'd left the scene of the crime, Glory herself had been nowhere to be found, only the body of the all too human Young Dr. Kildare. Someone had killed him, but the slayer would never kill a human.

Spike let them ramble without saying a word himself. This was the first time he'd been in Buffy's company this way, easy and unencumbered. Friends, not enemies. As if she was opening a door not just to her life, but to their lives as comrades in arms.

Dawn tugged his arm around her shoulders, then made a little strangling sound when she saw his arm.

"You're hurt," she said quietly.

Buffy was instantly on her feet, holding his arm out for inspection. "What happened?" The heat of her hand on his skin, the smell of her so near, intoxicated him so that he couldn't answer.

None of them had actually asked him about the goings on up above, and he'd no idea how much Dawn would have spilt before he got there. "Just a souvenir from Doc." Spike looked at Xander. "You remember our friend with the horrorshow tongue? He wasn't quite as dead as we thought. Was all set to do my girl here some mischief. Found him blathering on when I got up there, waving a knife, blah blah kill you blah blah."

Xander shivered slightly. "He could give Gene Simmons oral issues."

"No kidding."

"We should get you a bandage," Dawn said, but Spike just laughed at her. Dawn looked up at Buffy and said, "He was going to make cuts on me. To open the portal. Shallow cuts, he said. But Spike took the knife away, that's when they had a fight before Spike pushed him off the tower."

"Be healed before you know it, kid. But the coat -- bugger slashed my coat." Hours later and he was *still* seething about that.

Tara mumbled a few words from near the vicinity of Willow's hair; Willow then waved her hand. The long rip in the sleeve was transformed. "Good as new." Tara smiled. "Just a little present for saving Dawnie; don't go asking for a new coat or anything."

A bloke could like her. Too bad she played for the home team.

When he looked over at Buffy she was watching him -- no, studying him, really. Only her look wasn't the harsh, scrutinizing glare it usually was. Her face was soft and interested, eyes searching his for something. Maybe looking for a soul, hoping he'd grown one unexpectedly so she could treat him decently, treat him like Angel. Well, too damn bad. No soul today, but she still had to treat him like a hero.

After a while Spike got up and motioned that he was going to have a cigarette out back. Dawn followed him. He sat down on the edge of the step. She did likewise, and they sat quietly for awhile, arms and hips touching, looking up at the sky.

When he blew the smoke out he tried to keep it away from Dawn. Wouldn't do for big sis if he got the bitty one hooked on the evil weed. Hard to believe this quiet sky and average suburban night was the same one the world could have ended on. Dawn didn't say anything, simply sat quietly next to him, gazing at the same sky.

When Buffy came into the kitchen to refill the snack bowls she saw the two of them out on the back porch. Their voices floated inside. She stopped what she was doing, moving into the shadows to watch and listen. They'd been out there for a while. She couldn't imagine what they talked about and why Spike would willingly put up with a teenage girl. But in a weird way, vampires were like teenagers, all id and very little ego or superego to keep them in check. Or at least, that was Tara's theory, and it made sense to Buffy.

"I mean," Dawn said to him, "I don't even know. Does this mean I'm not a key anymore, if I don't unlock anything? And after all these years of not having a sister, now Buffy's stuck with me and she never had any say in the matter. So that's what I mean, I guess... what's my point, you know?"

"Being her little sis, that's your point, you nimrod," Spike said angrily. "Giving her a reason to go on. She was willing to throw us all to the wolves for you, so don't you go thinking that just because you weren't her sister before, that's all water under the bridge." Well, that much hadn't changed, Buffy thought -- he still mixed metaphors.

"I just feel like... like there's no real need for me anymore. She never did need me. And Mom's gone." Dawn curled her arms in front of her chest and leaned forward while Spike patted her shoulder. Just like he did to me when he found out Mom was sick, Buffy remembered with a sharp icy pain. After all this time, she was seeing pieces of a puzzle come together, making a new picture of how much he really did care.

"That's just crap. And I happen to know you're wrong."

"What am I going to do with my life?" That was the kind of question that made Buffy ache inside. Her inability to help Dawn know who she was twisted her gut. Yet here Spike was, talking to Dawn in a way that Dawn got and responded to, in a way that Buffy could never hope to reach her.

He turned his head. His white hair was luminescent in the porch light and his skin so pale; even at this distance it looked as if you could see the veins and blood beneath. Then he took off his coat to put it over Dawn's shoulders, like a guy giving a girl his letterman's jacket. He was wearing his requisite black tee, and as his arm passed through the light, the cut on it showed black in the darkness.

"You are gonna grow up and become a complete stunner and break the hearts of all the blokes who fall for you, is what you're gonna do. Be every bit as wonderful as your sister, and you won't live in her shadow because you'll be you. People will love you for you. So shut the bleeding hell up and just get on with it. Christ, I hate whingeing."

Dawn moved towards him for a hug, but instead he reached out and playfully shoved her head back while she flailed her arms at him, making for a big show of emotion. The harder she tried, the more he pushed. Dawn giggled helplessly. Spike was smiling, Buffy realized. Really smiling. Enjoying himself, enjoying Dawn.

Then they got up and came inside, but Buffy wasn't quick enough and they caught her standing there at the window. As Dawn slipped past her with a suspicious and smug look, Spike stood in front of her, his body nearly touching hers. She could smell the tobacco and leather even though Dawn had his coat, the scent of the goop he used to keep his hair plastered down. Buffy touched the back of his hand with her fingertips, his skin cool like granite.

"Thank you. For talking to her that way. I could never..."

"Nothing special. She's a good kid."

He leaned a little closer and for one moment Buffy could almost imagine kissing him. But not quite.

"I've never seen you smile like that. Not a mocking smile, or that predatory grin you used to get when we fought. Or mister triumphant victor when you were kicking my ass. Happy."

Spike turned away, stricken. That she would take note of something like that was almost too much to grasp. As if she thought of him once in a while, noticed things about him. They weren't enough to convince her he was worth her time, though. He snapped himself back to his coolest, most detached manner. "Predatory grin, eh? Mocking smile?" He tried the happy one she liked so much on for size.

"See, that would pretty much be what I meant. You look like a shark when you do that."

"Flattery will get you everywhere you want, luv."

Quickly Buffy moved away from him. He'd scupper his chances by being a wiseass. Daft prick. He could never quite get a handle on how far was too far when teasing her. Oh, who was he kidding? If he didn't get to her now with this extra leverage he'd obtained tonight, he never would.

Spike followed Buffy back into the living room and sat next to her on the sofa, prepared to dig in and bet his way to the whole kitty.

 

 

Dawn frowned at Buffy, holding up her Chinese firecracker shirt in one hand and in the other her pink-sparkled baseball jersey with the ironic cat. "Okay, this one or this one?" Buffy just didn't want to get the look she was going for, as if she could just wear *any*thing to hang with Spike. Of course, if Buffy had her way, she wouldn't be hanging with Spike at all, but it's not like she had to come right home after school. There was room now that Glory was gone and things were back to... well, normal wasn't right, obviously, with Mom gone, but something vaguely resembling normal.

Not that she'd ever really understood normal. Even in all the false memories the monks gave her, their lives had never been average. Often times Dawn had longed for a bland, boring life like other kids at school rebelled against, just so she didn't have to hide her understanding of how truly evil the world was. To stop keeping secrets about demons and gods and keys and hell dimensions, secrets that weighed her down till she felt broken. Sometimes she yearned to drag a schoolmate out to a cemetery at night and shadow Buffy on patrol, just so people could see how really important things were. And how important Dawn was. That she wasn't just some kid whose dad had left them and now whose mom had died, as well.

"That one shows too much lower tummy with those jeans. You're still fifteen, and I don't mean Jodie Foster hooker fifteen, either."

"Like you never wore--"

"Dawn! Knock it off. Just wear the pink one, okay? Don't make me be momish, I hate that. We had one mom and I don't want to pretend that I'm her." Both of them stared down at the floor, stricken. Buffy sat on the edge of Dawn's bed, her hands in her lap. This feeling of helplessness was overwhelming at times. She wanted to be good with Dawn, she wanted to be helpful, but everything came out wrong. Even though Dawn was seeing the counselor at school, it wasn't like she could tell him how difficult the circumstances had been since their mother's death. What was she supposed to say? This god who wanted to create a rift in the dimensions and turn earth into a hell for every being on the planet was after me because I was the key to opening the dimensions, and then my sister the vampire slayer had to do battle with her after she kidnapped me to cut me up before I was rescued by a vampire who's in love with that same sister the slayer. Yeah, sure, you betcha.

Instead of flouncing out and giving Buffy the silent treatment, though, Dawn sat on the bed beside Buffy and put her hand over her sister's. "I'll wear the pink one, okay? Besides, I was only going to see Spike. I wasn't going to, you know, walk the streets down by the docks or anything."

"Dawn, you..." Oh, crap, how on earth could she explain this to her now, so she'd get it?

"I know, he's a vampire and you hate him because he's, well, a vampire and you're worried about him being a bad influence since he's... a vampire. I just... Well, I like being around him. He never ever talks to me like I'm a dumb kid--"

"I do not talk to you like you're a dumb kid!"

Dawn furrowed her brow. "--and he always listens to me and he's funny."

Buffy looked at her incredulously.

"No, really! He is. And he saved me, Buffy, and it means a lot to me."

What would Mom have thought? As long as she knew where Dawn was, Buffy could imagine her mother allowing it, within reason, especially after Spike had helped them. Spike cared for Buffy and he couldn't hurt Dawn, so with Glory out of the picture, it shouldn't be dangerous. Maybe she just hadn't wanted Dawn to hang out with him because she was afraid of what it meant now that he'd done the heroic thing. That Spike would work on Dawn until something changed with him and her...

"All right," Buffy said, "obviously you've got the crush monster real bad here. Just be home for dinner."

Throwing her shirt over her head and rapidly pinning her hair back, Dawn yippeed and grabbed her book bag before flying out the door.

It was stupid to worry over her. The biggest threat was gone. Vampires and demons weren't threats, not so much. Now it didn't matter if the days were longer or shorter -- if Dawn was still hanging out there when it was dark, Spike would walk her home. She was okay in the daylight, safe in the dark. There were times Buffy wished she knew what that feeling would be like.

After a few moments of gathering some energy Buffy went off to tackle her day. The house really needed tidying up but she spent the time instead figuring out how to pay the bills -- she'd have to ask Giles about that stipend again from the Watcher's Council. Then she had to go to the U to see about getting into summer quarter after losing more than a month of classes.

Always something she should be doing. Her whole life was ruled by shoulds. As Buffy left the house she thought back to the vision in the desert, that death is your gift schtick. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed like some kind of prophecy. When she'd fought Glory, it had echoed darkly in her mind. Was the death of Glory a gift to the world? Or did it mean something else?

Throughout her day, whenever her attention was left to wander she turned that around in her brain. Spike once told her that you couldn't fuck with a prophecy. They were always purposely vague and if you did something to thwart it, thinking you knew what it meant, the prophecy would turn around and bite you on your ass, becoming something else entirely. Something you weren't prepared for. What if her gift of death (and really, what did that mean? Could someone return the gift if she kept the receipt? Did they have to write her a thank-you note?) wasn't what she thought it was? Once she'd been the subject of a prophecy that both Angel and Giles had told her she couldn't change. No matter how much she'd wanted to change it, she couldn't. Whatever "death is your gift" meant may not really have been what they thought it was.

When dinnertime rolled around Dawn came breezing through the door. They had a quiet supper, the first they'd spent alone together in a very long time, then cleaned up, some new CD Dawn had borrowed from a classmate on the stereo.

While they were doing dishes Buffy asked, "What exactly do you *do* with Spike, anyway? I can't imagine what you could possibly find to do." Was he telling her horrible stories about killing people? Or did they just watch Passions and binge on Twizzlers and Pepsis?

"No, he's interesting. Like, he can help me with history, because he knows about stuff first-hand."

Buffy exhaled loudly. "All I've ever seen him do is drink and watch TV." She could just imagine the "history" Spike would know first-hand.

"Well, yeah, he does that, too. But I mean, he reads a lot. Poetry and old books and stuff."

"Poetry? Oh, you are so kidding me."

Dawn hmphed and did a hip-tilt. After fuming for a couple seconds, she said, "No, he really knows stuff. And I missed almost all of the past month -- when we were reading Shakespeare in class I wasn't there, and he walked me through the things I missed. Everyone thinks he's stupid, but he knows, like, Latin and ancient Greek and that kind of thing." She made her funny little stiff-necked side to side head shake. "And he calls it maths, like there's so much of it you need plurals. It's because of where he went to school. Or when, I mean. Didn't you ever notice the books in his place?"

"I can't say I've ever seen a book at his... crypt." As if somehow that disproved all of Dawn's statements.

"Well, I mean, sometimes he breaks into the library at night. Or bookstores. Okay, I know that's bad! I do. But he said he can read better there when no one's around. I thought he was making it up, but I think he's telling the truth, because he knows about all these books and if he hadn't read them, then how would he know?"

Buffy just shook her head. Intellectual improvement was something she'd never have credited to him. So Spike had Secret Underlying Depths. Or maybe the depths only came out since the chip, because he couldn't do the things he really wanted to. She imagined life would be very boring for him as it stood now. Despite being able to get the violence out of his system fighting demons, there'd be little else to do and he was alone the rest of the time. Angel had been at peace with his solitude, but Spike didn't seem the type to enjoy forced isolation at all -- there was an energy and a fervor in him that wouldn't tolerate being alone too long.

Eventually Buffy forced Dawn upstairs for homework and waited for Xander and Anya to show. Despite Dawn's protests, Buffy was adamant about not leaving her alone at night without someone around. Safety was one thing but keeping Dawn home for classwork was another matter. Fortunately her wonderful friends, people who understood the reality of a slayer's life on the Hellmouth, were there by her side, willing to alternate nights so Buffy could patrol and keep the world safe for teenage girls in pink sparkly cat tops.

After a quick recon around town she meandered to the cemetery, checking around for any fresh graves. Things had been inordinately quiet, and maybe that was a good thing. Battles like she'd had a few days ago weren't really something you just sprang back from. Couldn't land a perfect dismount on the vault and rush off to the balance beam.

Before she knew it she was standing in front Spike's crypt. Buffy knocked lightly and pushed the door open. It was an unwritten rule that no one ever waited for him to answer; it was a crypt, after all, and he wasn't exactly its intended resident. Not a homeowner ensconced in the sanctity of his fully mortgaged dream house.

But he wasn't even there. Inexplicably disappointed, Buffy called down the hole in the ground, waited a few minutes, and decided to leave. It didn't do to poke around in Spike's place; she often found things she didn't want to see. And it was oddly creepy here without him. She pulled the stake from her sleeve and opened the door, only to bump straight into Spike.

"Slayer!" He seemed surprised to see her, a little jumpy and too much emphasis on the S; maybe he was worried she'd caught him in something disreputable. He closed the door behind them and she sat on the marble bench, putting the stake down next to her, watching him take off his coat. "If you're worried about kid sis, I promise I'm keeping the stories strictly G-rated. Not even a Goosebumps-level tale of the darkside from me." He held up three fingers. The idea of him even knowing anything about the Boy Scouts was cosmically sickening. Probably he'd snacked on a few in his time.

"I just... I just wanted to say thank you. I kind of felt like I didn't get to do it properly the other night. You have no idea how grateful I am. We are."

Spike shrugged and started to say something, then abruptly stopped. "Glad I could help."

It was dark in here so she couldn't quite see his face, although Buffy knew he could see hers quite well. As if reading her thoughts, he stood abruptly and flicked open his lighter to start some of the candles. There must be a whole Pottery Barn in here. All stolen, no doubt.

He sat back down, facing her, leaning forward. His face was all angles and lines, Buffy thought. No matter how much she despised him, there was no getting around the fact that he was very handsome. Without the peroxide in his hair he might even be called hot. And of course if he wasn't an evil, soulless, undead killer. How many times had he used his handsomeness to lure a young woman somewhere, then feed off her and kill? Buffy could see him in a dark, smoky bar. Smiling and beguiling, using that low, mysterious voice to lure, and then throwing his victim to Drusilla after he'd had a laugh. The idea of being beholden to him was nauseating.

She thought for a moment about leaving, but he cocked his head to the side, a faint smile on his lips and eyes glittering in the candlelight. She decided to stay. It was so wacked that they could be silent with each other, that there was such a level of comfort now that they could simply sit and be.

"Did you know you were the only vampire I was ever afraid of?" she asked conversationally.

The first response was to laugh. But he knew that was the wrong response and she'd get lathered up with rage, so it was best to go with the second response, whenever it came along.

"Not even the Master really scared me, and he was the one prophesied to kill me, which he did in the end. But you'd killed two slayers, and I didn't get rid of you the first time. You came so close once or twice, and you saw it as such a... a sport."

There were times Spike thought it was a good thing he couldn't breathe. She would make him forget to, or else he'd feel gut-punched and then end up choking for air, which would appear incredibly undignified. How was it she could do this to him, make him feel like he owned an actual heart to rip out?

Her gaze moved slowly up from the floor to his face, sad and regretful. There were years of pain in her eyes, the set of her mouth. Pain worn like a shroud and dark as obsidian. "And now you're saving Dawn and making like the hero. World spinning."

He was so wrapped up in her confession (which she would not have meant as a compliment, but he decided to take it that way) that it took him a moment to put it all together. Suddenly he realized what he'd heard her just say. "Wait -- what? The Master killed you? When?"

"I guess it would have been just before you got here. There was a prophecy that the slayer would die that night in some book Giles was reading. The Tampax something or other. And nothing I did stopped it. He... I drowned, and Xander brought me back."

"That sodding fuck." He'd heard about that geezer from Angel and Darla for years when they traveled around, and was glad he'd never had to meet the arrogant, preening bastard. No possible way could Spike have given that ponce his fealty, and ancient vamps were obsessed with obeisance. His hands twitched, making fists. He hadn't felt such a desire for revenge in decades.

"Don't pretend you wouldn't have wanted that back then. Maybe even now. A little." But there was a question in her eyes, like she was testing him.

"I'd had no idea. He was gone when we got here and... I would die for you now. That's what I went up there to do. Die saving her, saving you."

"Spike, don't." She held her hand up as if in surrender, then stood, possibly to leave.

"Don't what? Remind you how I feel? Remind you just how far I'd go for you?" He stood, coming closer. Heat radiated off her, surrounding his body like a wave, making him dizzy. They were nearly shoulder to opposite shoulder, his head down near hers, all his muscles tensed. Buffy put her hand against his chest lightly as if to ward him off, but she didn't push him back. He stayed there, motionless. Inside her heart beat faster, the rushing of the blood through her veins audible to him, the distinct smell of blood as it heated. Christ, all this time and he could never have believed it, but she did feel something. Hated herself for it, but felt it anyway. Her body couldn't lie, its signals were as clear as traffic lights.

Buffy kept her eyes down on the floor, afraid to look up at him even though she could feel his eyes on her, burning with hostility and adoration and desire. For a moment Buffy felt she was separated from her body looking at this scene, their shoulders nearly touching, her hand on his chest near his beatless heart. Face so near her face, lips so near her own

"Death is your gift," the first slayer's voice said, painted face flashing into view. Buffy gasped and jerked away, shaking her head and blinking to clear the image from her mind.

Grabbing her by the arms, Spike asked in a panicked voice, "What is it?"

She looked up at him, expecting anger and seeing only fear. "I... fallout. From the other night. Just something that's been eating at my mind." His hands were strong, comforting, and she didn't want him to let go but he had to. He *had* to. After sliding out of his grasp she sat down, her heart going a mile a minute and the blood pounding in her head. From Spike's closeness or that glimpse of the slayer, she didn't know.

Standing above her, looking down, he said softly, "Tell me."

"I can't." He'd see it as rejection but she couldn't tell him, not at this moment. It wasn't that she couldn't trust him now, but that she didn't know herself what she thought. "Yet." Was the yet for him, or for her? Whichever, it worked well enough that he didn't act like a spitting cobra, all puffed up and angry the way he usually got when he thought she was rejecting him. Calmly he sat down, elbows on knees, leaning forward to watch her intently. His scrutiny was mesmerizing sometimes. She'd seen vampires do that before, almost hypnotize humans with their gazes -- Drusilla had been especially deadly with it. Were all vampires capable of that, or only those who knew magic and all that gypsy nonsense, as Spike called it? It must be situational, she reasoned, else why hadn't Spike laid some juju on her before or gotten Xander and Giles to treat him better?

Finally she tore her gaze away from him and said, "I actually came by to tell you something else. I'm taking Dawn to San Francisco to visit our dad. That's where he's moved for now and we hadn't spoken with him since mom died, and now that this key business is finished, well."

Spike sat back, taking the news in. His face flickered with different thoughts, eyes closing partway in that removed manner he had. A watching animal, waiting.

"It's just for three weeks. I'm going back to school in summer quarter, and Dawn has to make up all the days she lost in the past few weeks by going to summer school herself. And then when we get back... there are things I haven't done, things I have to do." He'd know she was talking about her mom.

"Ah. You'll be wanting me to hold down the fort," he said dispassionately, "keep the world safe for democracy."

"Oh, maybe a little. But you don't have to do it if you don't want to. Giles and the rest--"

"And leave that lot of fuckwits alone with sharp pointy objects? They'd all be dead in a fortnight from their own stupidity if the vampires and demons didn't kill them first."

She laughed. He liked it when she laughed, it made her seem girlish and cute. Pixie-ish, maybe. Although best not to tell her that, she'd be decidedly unpixie-ish about it and probably beat him senseless.

Of course she had every right to go and the Pigeon would need that sort of thing considering how misplaced she felt now. But it made his gut ache thinking of being without Buffy for longer than a few days. As if he had her in his life right now. "They'll never stand for it though."

"They will now. They have to. I don't care what their issues are anymore, I just need to know that people will take care of each other and no one will do anything foolish and that everyone's safe. The game has changed. They can learn to get along with you -- we have to stand together."

Her vehement insistence was shocking to him. Spike would never understand Buffy if he lived a thousand years. She was so inside herself, kept so much back. A mystery to everyone, even old Rupert himself. Now she was acting his supporter just because of one little action? Talk about world spinning.

"Right, then," he said briskly, nodding. "Count on me."

"I do."

If she'd thrown herself at him passionately she could not have surprised him more or made him feel such overpowering love for her. Something burned behind his eyes. As he watched her leave, he dully realized it was tears. Something he hadn't felt in so long he didn't even think this body was capable of them.

 

 

Willow and Tara were both gazing at her over the rims of their enormous coffee cups, pretending to pay attention when Buffy knew they were rubbing knees under the table. Buffy noticed that Willow had dried whipped cream on the end of her nose and was surprised that Tara hadn't tried to remove it in some vaguely adorable but nauseating way that involved lips and tongues. They were usually pretty good about not doing the public displays of affection to a sickening degree, although they sure had their moments. Buffy envied them. To be so in love, to know someone would go to the lengths Will had gone for Tara when Glory had hurt her... Buffy felt more lonely than she ever had in her life, lonelier even than when she'd left town after killing Angel. Would she ever have love like that again? Was she even capable of it?

She was closed off to so much by necessity and kept things to herself, which most men didn't take very well. When she thought she'd given her all to Riley it still wasn't enough; men wanted it their way or not at all. With this kind of life there was probably no way to have any relationship with someone normal. The thought of her future was so bleak it choked her.

"I think it's great that your dad's finally settling down enough to have a visit. He's been gone too long from your life," Willow said.

"Yeah, well, we'll see how that goes. There's a lot of baggage, big giant warehouse aisles full of it. Baggage 'r Us." Not to mention her mother's death and his absence afterward, but that was something she didn't want to get into. "But anyways. That's not why I asked you to meet me. I wanted to ask you guys something."

Tara nodded, her head down, all eager smiles and encouragement.

"I talked to Giles the other day and he's arranged for the Watcher's Council to give me some kind of stipend for just being around. It's not much, in fact, it's hardly anything at all, but it helps. And Dawn and I both plan to take some kind of part-time jobs in order to keep the house and pay for school. But it's going to be hard, even if Dad helps once I talk to him. It would help a lot if we had what Giles kept calling a lodger. And I think that could be you guys. What would you say to moving in, since you're nearly living there already?"

The two of them looked at each other, startled. In Buffy's eyes there was a kind of desperation Willow had never seen. She wanted to believe it was the friendship that made Buffy ask and not the desperation. In the past few days Buffy had seemed so out of sorts, but she wouldn't say why. Clearly she wasn't sleeping, and Willow had talked about it with Tara, concerned that getting rid of Glory had now let all the horrors of day-to-day life move back into first place. That might be worse than any Hell god or demon Buffy could face.

"Oh!" was all Willow could manage to squeak out. Buffy's face crumpled at her lack of enthusiasm. Immediately Willow felt horrible. She whacked herself on the forehead. "Lameness, thy name is Willow. I'm sorry, Buffy, I didn't mean to act all rainy on your paradey. I was just surprised. We were surprised." She looked at Tara for confirmation, and Tara nodded.

"I know. And you don't have to say anything right now. I understand." But Buffy looked so kicked-puppy that it was painful. Under the table she felt Tara's hand close around hers and knew what Tara was telling her to do.

"I think it would be a great idea. We could, like, complain to you when the water heater breaks, and mutter under our breaths about the slumlord conditions," Willow said brightly.

Tara grinned. "And just think! Built-in babysitters for Dawn. Not that, you know, Dawn's a baby or in need of sitting, but... you know... you can't tell when something is going to come up on the Hellmouth, right? We want to be there for you, Buffy."

Buffy wanted to cry, to jump across the table and hug her friends. There were so many times she felt undeserving of the people she loved. She started to sniffle. "You guys. I love you guys."

"Which... where..." Willow started to ask, but then stopped, eyes the size of her coffee cup.

"Oh, you'd get mom's room, of course."

"Oh, Buffy, I don't know if that's necessary." Willow's voice was worried but tender.

"It's okay, Will," Buffy said, reaching out a hand and patting her arm. "It's what I planned. I don't want to move in there, and it's the best room for two. You don't have to do this right away. When I get back, I was going to finally clean out... stuff. Mom's stuff. I tried to once before only Dawn got serious wiggins over it. But it's time. She has to start classes right after we get back, and I'll do it when she's out of the house."

"W-we could... d-do that if you want. While you're... away," Tara said. She only stammered when she was upset or nervous. She tried not to be, but she'd done nothing to help Buffy recently during their nightmare with Glory, only been helped by Buffy. Tara was concerned this was too little, too late.

Buffy's aura was so dark now she seemed cloaked in a night of her own. Troubled by nightmares, Tara could tell, and now this, finally making a break with her childhood, with her mother. And there was something else about Buffy, something she couldn't tell Willow, but that maybe she should talk to Buffy about later when they could be alone. Something about cheating death. It was faint, like a radio signal from far away, but distinct. As if Buffy believed she wasn't supposed to be here, or worse, didn't deserve to be.

"No, no," Buffy answered. "It's okay. I think I need to do it, if you know what I mean."

"Okay," Tara said quietly, ducking her head. "I know what you mean." When she looked up, Buffy's eyes were glassy with tears. "But we'll be here for you. Backup. Everyone n-needs backup." Buffy grinned at her, which seemed to dissipate some of the darkness of her aura, scattering it like dandelion seeds in wind. Not a lot, but enough to make Tara feel relieved.

"So we're all settled, then, right? We're roomies again!"

Willow reached across the table and held her hand out flat. Buffy did the same, and Tara followed suit. "All for one! One for all! Or wait, maybe that's backwards. Does it matter?"

 

 

"Oooohhhh gaaawwd!" Spike bellowed as Anya drove the stake into his left shoulder blade. "Screaming rat FUCK!" He twisted down and away, but the stake stayed in him like a meat thermometer because the dozey bitch had panicked and let go of it. The vampire underneath him let out an "oof!" as Spike fell on top of him, and then he shoved Spike off with his legs. Stumbling backwards, Spike screamed at Anya to pull the stake out, but she continued to flutter around. Finally Xander stepped in and yanked on it just as the vampire they'd been fighting knocked Xander backwards, sans stake. Spike twisted his body to try to reach it, but he couldn't get a grip on it and the pain was near to knocking him out. Finally Xander scrambled sideways and yanked it out. Berk. Spike bellowed again, inarticulate animal sounds that made the whole bastarding lot of them jump backwards in fear. Even in his haze of rage and pain he enjoyed that. It had been a long time since any of them acted scared of him. Served them bloody right, it did.

He ripped the stake out of Harris's hand and pivoted, driving it right into the center of the vamp's chest as he leapt towards them. Anya continued fluttering around like a moth with a missing wing. One would think that after all this time the stupid twat would have got this routine down, but she still acted all Perils of Pauline every fucking time they patrolled.

Dropping to one knee Spike clutched at his arm, trying to control his anger. Suddenly he heard Willow inside his head, yelling at him that the other two vamps were getting away and Giles had been knocked down. He staggered up and shouted, "Get out of my fucking head! Isn't it enough that this stupid. Fucking. Cow! just drove a stake into me? What the HELL do you people want from me!" They all stepped back another few feet. That felt good.

But it didn't deter the witch-bitch. She firmly said again, right inside his skull, "They're getting away." He took a deep breath and ran towards them, regretting once again his own stupid greed and all the things that had led him back to Sunnydale and this life of hell. He could hear the rest of them scurrying behind him like rats. The two vamps ahead of them abruptly branched out in different directions of the park. Spike pointed the other way and somehow Xander and Anya, usually far too stupid for directional gestures, understood him. Tara stayed on running behind Spike. He was starting to take rather a shine to that girl.

His shoulder was killing him. Being brassed off was actually energizing, though, and he caught up to the vampire, springboarded off a bench to land feet first on him, and then plunged the stake into the heart. Poof, and he was shrouded in dust. Tara stood over him, panting. "Should we... pant... go help... pant pant... the others?"

"Hell no." He clutched his shoulder, bent over from the pain. "I dunno about you, but I can barely stand, let alone catch up to them."

When Tara leaned over to catch her breath Spike was momentarily distracted from his pain. The deep V of her sweater fell forward and exposed so much of her pillowy breasts that he could just see the rosy edges of the areolas. Tart. Coupled with the low, low cut of her jeans exposing her belly nearly to the pubic bone, he was feeling more alert with lust than crippled with pain. In his time this was the ideal figure for a woman, soft and round but not plump; womanly with possibilities. It amused him no end that for the second time now he'd fallen for a scrawny girl without such a ripe, gorgeous figure, but oh well. Cupid, the little cunt, didn't give a toss where he shot his arrows and for whom. Spike could happily see himself fucking the lush and luscious witch from behind (well, if he hadn't loved Buffy already, that is), his hands engulfing her ample tits, his knob sliding in between the soft, round curves of -- oh, bugger, she was talking at him.

"What?"

"Stop looking at me like I'm dinner." Her face was stern but her voice teasing in melody.

He rubbed his throbbing shoulder. "Sorry, pet. It's distracting. You're like a juicy, ripe pear. All curvy and--" He made squeezing motions with his hands. Tara stomped her foot and glared at him, but the tug at the corners of her mouth showed she was more game than she let on. Crikey, he liked her; more's the pity.

From his left he saw Giles stumbling towards them, rubbing his head and clutching a crossbow. "Oh, *now* he wakes up, how convenient." Spike glowered at Giles, who looked questioningly at Tara.

"Anya accidentally staked him," Tara explained.

Giles opened his mouth, ready, no doubt, with some cheeky remark about wishing it could have been a few centimeters right, but then stopped himself. So Buffy had given them all a little pep talk, Spike thought. Made sure they'd toe the line with old Spike, keep their antagonism in check while she wasn't around to baby-sit them. He laughed to himself. It didn't matter, he hated the lot of them as much as they hated him. Every time he thought of Giles shoving that blanket at him, pushing him out the door while they all stared angrily at him -- even the Tadpole -- it made him feel like vamping out, testing the chip and just... having a go. Christ, he missed the violence. The sheen of fear on people when he came near. The headache would be worth scaring them good. Punishing them.

Xander and Anya stumbled up to join them, although Tara and Giles couldn't see them coming. Spike laughed as both Giles and Tara jumped and gave little girly yelps when Xander said something to let them know he was there.

"We got him!" Anya exclaimed. "But he was a girl fighter and pulled Xander's hair." She rubbed his head and cooed at him. All of them turned away in disgust.

Then Willow came jogging up to finish the meeting of the Justice League. Spike glared at her as she gave him a "what?" look and spread her hands wide. "It was the quickest way!" Out of the lot of them, the witches were trying hardest to be friendly to him, but he really hated having her jump around in his head like that.

"Next time, knock. It doesn't do to go rummaging around in people's private bits without their permission."

"Oh, like you ever worried about things like that," Willow said tartly.

Spike glared harder.

Mumbling vague apologies to Spike, Anya moved towards him. Spike growled, tiger-like, jumping backwards. "I wasn't trying to hurt you!" she cried. "But you were all zig-zaggy and that enormous vampire was kicking your slighter-in-stature butt. I wasn't born to be a slayer, you know. No one told me when I became human that I was supposed to learn fighting and staking for substitute slaying."

They all began walking back towards... well, where were they going, anyway? Usually people went to the Summers house afterwards, but that would be empty a few more days yet. He fell in behind with Giles, even though he wasn't sure where they were walking.

"So, tell me," Spike said to Giles, "who put the finishing touches on Gentle Ben?"

Squinting, Giles asked, "What?" with all the innocence of a mafia hit man. Spike had to grudgingly admit a certain admiration for the geezer, the way he'd stood up to Angel's torture with sang-froid. But that whole thing at the Magic Box after the Dru fiasco... it burned much hotter inside him.

"Oh, dash it all, Jeeves, let's not dissemble, eh?" Spike said smoothly. "When last I looked, it wasn't Glory lyin' there dead, but her alter ego the dream doc. Someone put the finishing touches on him. And the slayer doesn't kill humans, so my money's on you."

Giles stared fixedly at him for a moment, his stride slowing almost to a stop. Spike paced him, watching carefully. It hadn't occurred to him that Spike would be clever enough to figure that out. How much would he tell Buffy -- or would he just use the threat of telling her in order to get what he wanted? Was there anything Spike truly wanted, though, besides Buffy?

"I can't imagine what you mean," Giles finally said as evenly as he could. There were times he wished they had the nerve to stake Spike once and for all. If he could kill Ben, why not Spike? What was it that drove this pity and forced them to keep putting up with him? And now Buffy making it worse with her firm instructions about letting Spike in and being decent to him. It really was too much. The gloating and plotting Spike must be doing made Giles livid with resentment.

Laughing evilly, Spike said, "Now, now, Rupert. We're all working for the same superhero gang here."

"Stop playing games. If you think you can threaten or cajole your way to Buffy, you're quite mistaken about your information, I assure you."

Spike grinned maliciously. "Don't have to do any of that. I'm already there."

There was the ugly, undeniable truth that infuriated Giles. His job had been to watch over Buffy, to guide and teach, yet the one thing he couldn't drill into her was to stay the bloody hell away from vampires with a romantic interest in her. There was a sick, twisted level to Spike's infatuation with Buffy that trumped even Angel's interest, some strange dance about power and death that neither of them seemed in the least aware of. It frightened Giles to think that Spike's new hero status with both Dawn and Buffy would force a relationship, a doomed one. He'd known for some time that his post here was redundant; now, perhaps, it was even more important to move on and let Buffy live her life, to stay out of it, precisely because he wouldn't be able to tolerate Spike's continued presence in their lives.

Giles gazed blankly at Spike for a moment, then strode away to the head of the group. At the edge of the park Willow and Tara turned to look at him. "We were going to the Bronze to hang out, decompose... um! decompress a little." Willow didn't exactly ask him to come, but she was trying to let him know he was welcome if he wanted to join them.

She watched as he sized her up, trying on different responses, knowing that even with the past weeks of patrolling and working together he was still the feared and loathed outsider. They always treated him that way, as much as they tried not to. Still clutching his shoulder, he looked down at the ground and for a moment Willow thought she could see genuine hurt there, the kind of hurt only a human would feel. As if something human had fluttered birdlike through his mind for one instant before vanishing into the darkness of the demon. He cocked his head to the side, dropping his gaze to each one of them in turn. "Hard to say no to an evening with the Powerpuff Girls and Professor Utonium, but I think I'll stay in tonight. Catch up on my rest now I've had a stake through my shoulder. Thanks for the almost-invite, though."

He turned quickly on his heel and Willow watched him go before she looked helplessly at Tara. "I don't know what to do," she said quietly. Tara put a hand on her arm sympathetically; no one had any answers for her, only understanding glances.

He could hear their gaggling voices behind him as he walked away to the cemetery, then lost them in the sound of passing cars. Pausing to light a cigarette -- which ripped pain through his entire upper left half -- he turned to watch them go. The cute little Scooby gang. The worst part of all this was knowing that if Buffy ever did let him in, this was his future \-- supercilious half-wits, rude witches, barmy ex-demons, and enough issues to go around for a Christmas dinner with the whole family. They were all barking lunatics and he was maddest of them all for falling in love with someone he shouldn't. He slammed the door of the crypt behind him and threw off his coat, then went downstairs to the bed, grabbing the last bottle of Jack Daniel's on the way. After some time he took off his T-shirt to inspect the tear. Well, yet another one down. Have to go out and pinch some new ones. Good thing he wasn't wearing one of his silk shirts on top of it.

Patrolling with Buffy would be one of those special things to look forward to when she got home. On the rare occasions he got to go with her he'd enjoyed working out that energy, watching her balletic motion as she danced with death. Knowing that if he couldn't have her there was still a legitimate reason to be near her when she was at her most beautiful. Of course it was insanity for a vampire to love a slayer. But that was a large part of why he loved her. There was more to it, of course, but it was the deadly art of a slayer he'd first been so drawn to, the way insects would hurl themselves at the very light that would kill them.

At night he'd dream about fighting her. Dreams where fighting blurred into sex and he could touch her any way he wanted to. Spike grew aroused just thinking of it, undoing his belt and fly, slipping his hand inside his jeans. The smell of her lingered inside him after all this time, the essence of her heat and blood making him hard, aching for it. He stroked himself up and down, imagining the feel of her own strong, warm hand on his cock instead. "Buffy," he whispered to the empty walls, sliding his left hand down despite the pain in his shoulder to cup and stroke his balls, pulling hard repeatedly on his cock with his right. The silk of hair cascading around her shoulders, the creamy skin of her breasts filled his mind's eye he stroked himself until he came hard, muscles clenching and hips jerking up, imagining it was her he was inside of. Spike lay inert, his hand moving in slow circles over his lower belly as he rode that wave on the way down from climax, wondering if he'd ever really know that feeling with her.

Something was different, that much was true. But Spike was not good anymore with understanding exactly how to make it all work -- pushing too hard one way drove her off, but if he was passive he might miss his opportunity completely. It was such a hard line to walk. If he wanted to stop this fantasizing, to make her his, he had to walk it precisely.

 

 

Buffy was gathering up cleaning supplies when Spike came flying through the back door, smoking, and hurled his blanket across the kitchen. She jumped backwards, startled, not having expected company today -- let alone Spike in the daylight.

"Don't you think there are better times to come visiting?" she asked, hands on hips.

"Hello to you, too." He took the overheated coat off, throwing it on a chair. He felt unpleasantly warm. "Welcome back," he added, raising his eyebrows. There was a faint pink-sugar dusting of sun across the porcelain skin of her cheeks and nose, making her eyes glitter with that fresh-faced California sun goddess quality of fashion magazines and TV shows.

Buffy didn't say anything, just looked at him. It was surprisingly good to see him and she was momentarily nonplussed to realize she'd actually missed him. "What are you doing here now?" she snapped, pushing back the desire to hug him.

"Heard you were back. Thought I'd come by and see how you were."

"You couldn't wait for a less combustible time, like, say, tonight?"

He moved closer, eyes ranging along her like a glutton looks at the pastry counter. "You look tired, Slayer. A bit ragged around the edges. Thought this trip was supposed to help you, give you back some of your zippyness." He did a little shift with his jaw that made his comment seem lewd, something she'd seen a dozen times before in less friendly circumstances.

Her brain zoomed back and forth between possibilities. It could be that he was insulting her. But he looked concerned despite the facial gesture, eyebrows wrinkled and eyes filled with the soft, sad look Buffy had seen in quiet, private times.

"I didn't get a lot of sleep, really. And Dad... things are always kind of up and down with Dad." Why was she telling him this?

"Won't you tell me what's bothering you? Maybe I could help." He jumped up on the counter to sit, wearing the inviting expression she'd seen before as well. The night she'd found out about the CT scan. It was a look she was seeing more and more from him all the time.

"It's nothing. I'll get over it. A lot's happened the past few months, that's all." She didn't know how to explain the nightmares, anyway. Visions of the night they'd faced Glory, only different enough to scare her. Darker events, grimmer endings. Deep inside a voice told her it wasn't over, that something terrible was yet to come. But Spike would no doubt laugh at her, leaving her feeling small and foolish.

Spike looked around him at the stuff on the counter. "All right then. What you doin'?"

"I promised myself that when I got back and Dawn was going to classes, I would clean up the house top to bottom, and fix the things that needed fixing, and... Spike, I asked Willow and Tara to move in. They're here all the time anyhow, and this way I have help with the rent and with Dawn so I can do the slaying, and they're going to move into Mom's room. So I have to finally clean that out." She waited for him to make a remark about the hormone level in the house or all of them ending up on the rag together eventually, but he just nodded when she was finished.

"Look, I'm stuck here for a while. How about I help you? With everything, I mean." He grabbed a rag and a bottle of orange-colored something, jumping off the counter. "Mr. Clean, I am."

"You live in a crypt and a hole underneath that. In the ground. With dirt." Against her better judgment, Buffy smiled at him and nodded. "Okay. You're on. I don't trust you as far as I can throw you and I'll be checking the silver and crystal before you go, so don't even try it." He was so close to her right now that her skin itched. She remembered a few weeks ago, the sensation of his mouth so near hers, how his body had felt so solid and strong under her hand.

"Slayer?" he asked. She shook her head, then ran up the stairs to get away from him.

After finishing with her and Dawn's rooms and the living room, Buffy went looking for him, but Spike was nowhere to be seen. When she called, though, he answered with a muffled voice from the direction of the kitchen. His hips and legs stuck out from under the sink. She peered under the counter to see him lying there, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, pounding on pipes.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Hand me that... uh, screwdriver, will you?" he said, his hand jutting out.

"Please tell me you're not fixing something." She slapped the screwdriver into his hand.

"Didn't you want that leak in your disposal fixed? I could just put it back the way it was. Already fixed the drippy tap, so it's too late for recriminations." He couldn't see her face but could hear the frown in her voice. "Ah, listen, don't get your knickers in a twist. I know what I'm doing."

She knelt down and peered in at him. It looked like he did know what he was doing, but it all seemed so incongruous. Again with the confounding.

"Anything else kaput round here?" he asked.

"I don't think so." She looked around. "Wow. You did a really good job on the kitchen. And the dining room. It's..."

"Spick and span?"

"That wasn't what I was going to say, but okay. It's like having a peroxide blond Hazel or something. If Hazel was a guy, I mean. And a vampire. Anyway. I was going to stop for lunch. I don't... um..."

"Don't you worry 'bout me. Drank up before I left home today. Although I wouldn't mind a beer if you've one in the fridge."

"You mean that beer I'd have bought with my fake I.D.?"

"Oh, right. Forgot about that. Hm." He tightened the screw, then crawled up to test out the disposal. "Dry as a bone." Spike opened the fridge door and pulled out a beer. "See? When I cleaned out the cupboard, I saw a few left over in there. Must have been a secret stash of Giles's. Always thought he was a tippler." He opened it and drank, while Buffy watched the way his throat moved, wondering if that was how it looked when he drank from a human. His Adam's apple rising and falling, the muscles moving back and forth, telling the tale of his brutality. "Total bitch piss, but at least it's something."

She turned away while he finished his beer, ignoring him as she made a thin little sandwich of peanut butter and jelly. Spike suddenly felt so sorry for her he thought he might choke. This beautiful, deadly slayer, this finely tuned machine, reduced to such a mundane existence. Making measly little peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for herself and cleaning a house she was never meant to be in control of. His throat ached.

She'd saved the world how many times, and this was her reward? Buffy should be lying on a bed of silk and cashmere commanding her minions to peel her a grape while servants waited on her hand and foot. She ought to patrol with teams of helpers and never have to so much as break a nail in the fight. Potential lovers should line up at the door for the privilege of being her slave. Instead she was freighted with a house but no parents to pay for it, a teenager to take care of when she was barely out of her teens herself, days of emptiness and nights of fear, a true love who'd left her, and the obsessed adoration of an evil creature she despised.

Spike stared at her, knife in her hand, spreading peanut butter on white bread. Chewing his lower lip, trying to stop himself from raging at the horrible stupid agony of it all. Buffy was the greatest treasure in the world but she'd been ground into the dirt. Beaten into failure.

"Buffy," he whispered, taking the knife. She didn't look up. He was probably scaring her. Every time he was gentle to her a tincture of fear clouded her eyes. Spike finished making Buffy's sandwich, then pushed her into a chair and set the plate down. As she stared at the table he got a soda from the refrigerator.

When he sat down across from her, Spike put his hand over hers and said softly, "You shouldn't be stuck with this rubbish. Why don't you go shopping or some girly fun thing, and let me take care of it?"

Buffy looked up at him, her eyes so huge and round and yes, scared. He was sure the sound of his ghostly heart breaking could be heard all through the neighborhood.

"I'm okay." What else could she say? All of this was so strange, the Spike-as-normal-guy routine and being alone, just the two of them, doing... things. Regular things. Household things. Why did he have to be so nice? It would be easier if he'd just kept being a pig.

Staring silently at his forearms -- damn, he had nice forearms, especially for someone so thin -- Buffy finally looked at his eyes. "Spike, don't." Don't keep making me like you, because my world can't handle it. It's broken enough.

Finally she took a bite of her sandwich. Didn't speak again until she finished. "I have to do mom's room now," was all she said and went upstairs. As she neared the top of the landing, though, she heard Spike behind her. He came into the room as silently as a spirit.

Spike took his cue from Buffy, taking clothes and putting them into bags for the charity, throwing other things out in the trash. She was nearly completely shut down, rarely stopping to look at something or take a moment to reminisce when an item sparked a memory. He'd cared for Joyce, so Spike found himself looking at things, trying to remember her. To keep a bit of her inside himself; if for no other reason than for Buffy.

Spike sat on the floor in front of the dresser and pulled out the last drawer of things. Buffy sat down on the edge of the bed, tired and worn down. There was a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead and along the hairline. Her cropped sweat bottoms allowed her bare ankles to flirt with him as he sat next to her taking things out of the drawer. Her toenails were varnished a kind of opalescent pink, and he couldn't stop staring at them. He'd never seen her bare feet; wondered if she'd ever had the pleasure of having her toes sucked. Nah, probably not, since the idiot males she'd dated would never have lowered themselves to showing her that sort of delectation. Lots of things he could show her if she ever gave him the chance.

There was a jewelry box hidden under the odds and ends in the drawer, items Joyce had probably stashed away because she never wore them anymore, long forgotten or out of fashion. He opened it and held out a necklace.

"You'll want to keep this stuff. Even if it's out of style and you think you'd never want it, you'll have memories. It's the little things like this you need to keep."

The corners of her mouth tugged down, all the memories of her mother's death and everything that had happened since shoving hard into her chest. Like getting hit by the heavy bag on the swingback. It was always the little things that did it. Maybe that's why Spike was telling her to keep them. She willed herself to pull together. If Spike saw how vulnerable she felt, the softness inside her, he'd take advantage of it.

"Spike. Can I ask you something?" Buffy's voice was tiny and far away.

He looked up at her. "Course."

"You once said that a person can't cheat a prophecy. That if you do, it changes the prophecy. That the prophecy somehow... that it comes back at you in a different form. Would you know it if it came back?"

"Dunno. Could be wrong. Really don't know much about that beyond the basics, or at least, what goes into making them the way they are. Why?"

"No reason. I was just wondering. You know, about all the stuff that happened with Dawn." Something in his eyes spoke of doubt, though. "Spike, thank you for today. I... again, you keep coming through in the pinch."

"I was made for the pinch."

"I guess." Buffy took the jewelry box and smiled sadly at him. "You keep with the confounding. It's throwing off my equilibrium."

"I'll try to be more of a pig if it makes you happier."

Silence danced between them like the dust motes in the air as Spike put the last of the things in a bag. Then he turned to Buffy, still sitting on the edge of the bed. Spike reached over and touched that adorable ankle lightly with his fingertips, just grazing her skin. She didn't kick his teeth in, so he moved his fingers down along her instep, over her toes. Slid his whole hand up along the inside of her ankle, stopping just under the hem of her sweats. He waited to see how she'd react. She was staring at the top of his head, not really looking at him but not moving away, either.

"You're so amazing, Buffy," he said softly. "You don't even know. You think somehow you deserve all this suffering, but you don't. It's the world doesn't deserve you." There was a slight hitch in her breathing when he said that, so he grew daring enough to take her foot in his hands, caressing towards the sole in slow, gentle circles. Christ, she even had lovely feet, smooth and tiny and delicate. As he stroked and rubbed, he was lost in the sensation of her skin until he heard her make a sound in her throat. Was it pleasure or fear? Didn't matter, he went ahead anyhow, leaning down to kiss the top of her foot, trailing his lips softly up the curve of the instep to the inside of her ankle. He did the same to her other foot, and identical sounds came from her throat. Sounds that made the blood in his veins pound, heat fan out through his groin.

Men were such gits. Most of them had no idea of the power of small gestures on a woman, how the tiniest of graces could gain you entry to her heart and body. Too brainless to know the beauty of being allowed inside a woman's soul and how simple it was to get there. Nuance escaped them. They skipped past the wonder for the simple act of sex as if that was all a woman had to give.

When Spike looked up he saw that she was lying on the bed as if to offer herself, in the pose of one surrendered. He dropped her foot gently, sliding his hand up the curve of her leg, over her thigh, until it rested on her hip. He sat alongside her on the bed.

She was letting him touch her.

Her head was turned away from him towards the door, eyes locked on a corner of the ceiling, hands at her sides. Leaning above her on an elbow, Spike moved his hand gently along her side until he touched her collarbone, tracing its sharp edge over and over. Her heart was pounding.

There was no strength left in him to control the shaking in his hands, let alone control his mind and tongue. The poetic, adoring words he longed to say remained frozen inside his mouth. So he just ran his trembling hand along her face, barely touching her skin. The first time he'd seen her so many years ago she still had the soft roundness of youth, her mouth a bow-like pout and her power hidden under pillowy voluptuousness. Now she'd strengthened into adulthood with leaner lines and a firm mouth, the sharp planes of her body a history of her maturing beauty.

And she was still letting him touch her. But she did not touch him back.

Spike leaned closer, absorbing the scent of her skin. Her lips were parted and he pressed his hand to her cheek. She turned her head ever so slightly towards him. He came closer to kiss her cheek softly, keeping his lips there for a long time. Buffy's fingertips skated along his jawline.

Spike pressed his lips softly to hers. She was water to his parched soul \-- resurrecting it from its dessicated, forgotten state, making it pulse to life again.

Buffy's body yearned towards him as she turned sideways and placed her hands on his waist, holding onto him for dear life and feeling the hard muscle underneath her fingers. I can't, I can't, she told herself. I can't possibly be doing this. But he felt so real to her, so strong and sensual and *right*, and it was wonderful to kiss someone. Soft, warm summer rain that brought a spark to her hollow body. Sweet fire grew in her belly, tingling with life spreading out through her limbs. He trailed his lips across hers, teasing her mouth with his tongue. Then kissed along Buffy's neck, her chin, to her forehead, brushing loose, damp hair away from her face.

His mouth came back to hers, hungrier this time but still so soft and slow, his tongue parting her teeth and slipping inside, a teasing invader. Against Buffy's hip the urgency of Spike's hard penis, but he didn't push at her roughly or do anything that would take him beyond this single crossed boundary. Instead he let lips, tongue, and fingertips work in concert to make her ache with long-forgotten pleasure.

Downstairs the door opened and Dawn called up to her, "Buffy, I'm back!" Buffy pushed Spike away quickly and sat up, smoothing her hair, trying not to pant as if she'd been running laps -- or making out with someone. She glanced quickly at Spike, who looked dazed and a little wounded, his mouth shiny and full.

"Spike, I -- I'm sorry, I shouldn't have... we shouldn't have. I'm sorry." Turning towards the door, she shouted, "We're up here."

She stood away from him and nervously ran her hands over her clothes. He got up and went towards the window, probably trying to get his body under some control. It was a lot harder for guys to hide a macking session than for girls, she thought, sighing unhappily. What a moron to have let this go so far.

Dawn burst into the room swinging her pack. "Whatcha... oh." She looked at the bags, then at Buffy, and then over to Spike.

"Spike's been helping me clean things up for Willow and Tara. I was hoping you wouldn't have to see this, I..."

"No, it's okay." Dawn was using her best soldier-on voice, but she looked scared. Buffy wished Spike would comfort Dawn in the way only he seemed able to do. But his back was still turned, and he waved a hand weakly in Dawn's direction, then went into the bathroom and shut the door.

"Are you guys fighting?" Dawn whispered to Buffy.

Shaking her head, Buffy answered, "He was more emotionally attached to Mom than we realized." Tonight's winner on Way to Lie, Buffy! receives a fantastic trip for two to Guilt Island, not to mention these special parting gifts of shame and self-loathing!

"How were classes? Think it's going to work out okay?" Buffy changed the subject.

"Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a drag to be in school for the summer, but... I keep thinking about the way things could have been, if last month had gone different, so. Lesser of two evils and all."

Buffy flinched at the reminder. "Look at mature girl -- who are you, and will I be seeing my sister again any time soon?"

Dawn gave her a scalding look and flounced over to the bathroom door in a mock huff. Buffy idly wondered how long the good times between them would last. At least for now it was all right. But Dawn was a teenager, and Buffy well knew how easily her moods could change.

"Hey, Spike," Dawn said to the door. "I have this teacher in one of the classes? And she's from someplace down south, you know? And were talking about writing and European history, and she kept saying about how Charles Main did this, and Charles Main did that. And then I figured out she was talking about Charlemagne."

The door opened with a snap and Spike's head appeared. "You're taking the piss!"

"Am not," Dawn said, crossing her heart. "Hope to die and all."

"Stupid tw--iiit." Buffy scowled at him and he saw her just in time. "What's the bleedin' point of you going back to makeup classes if you're going to be taught by halfwits?"

"I don't know, but I'm going to have to try really hard not to laugh at her. I thought you might enjoy that," she said, her voice lowering along with her eyes, all coy and girlish. She smiled at him and turned to go.

God, this was weird, Buffy thought. Not only does Spike know how to talk to Dawn when she needs it, but she's totally clued in to his emotions and knows what to do to bring him around. The freakshow of her life just kept getting bigger and bigger.

As Dawn left, Spike slunk out of the bathroom with his head down. "Guess I should go," he said, his voice so quiet Buffy could barely hear him.

"You don't have to. Besides, it's still light out. Stay and talk to Dawn, watch TV, whatever. Or fix things." She tried to smile, but it didn't have any effect on him that she could see.

"Are we going to talk about it?" Buffy always avoided talking about anything, but he had to ask. The worst thing would be if she tried to pretend it hadn't happened. For one brief moment he'd had the heaven he could only dream of right in his hands. If she ignored it, that would be like robbing him of it.

"Spike, don't. It was a mistake, we both know that. You're... you know how sad and lonely I am lately, and you know how grateful I am that you saved Dawn... that you saved me. All of us. But you can't use the situation to get me to be what you want."

For weeks he'd considered as many ways as possible to use their changed relationship to his advantage. Yet when the time came to be with her, such selfishness was the furthest thing from his mind. Pleasing her, loving her the way she deserved... his intentions for once were totally honorable, yet still suspect.

"Use the situation?" he snapped. "Is that what you think I'm doing -- that it's just about what I want?"

"No. I... no, I don't mean it that way. I mean that you want something and you're very good at getting what you want."

"If I was good at getting what I wanted then I'd have killed you years ago."

Ice frosted her face, eyes, voice. "This wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been feeling how I feel lately. We should just forget it and move on. I felt bad that I couldn't give you what you want, and you seemed so sad..."

"Oh, brilliant. Pity fuck. That's what you think of me?" Spike shook his head.

She looked at him with such distrust that he couldn't believe it was the same girl who a moment ago had sighed with pleasure against his lips. So that's it. His impulse to strike her with more vicious words was strong, but he wouldn't yield to that and give her ammunition against him. Spike knew who she was now. No matter how much Buffy tried to convince herself she felt nothing, he knew the truth.

Through time he'd learned to overcome the rejection and loathing, to move past each blow to his affections. But this wasn't the ordinary rebuff. Now Buffy was pushing because she had to or else give in to something that repulsed her.

Flashing his most wicked smile, he walked past her out of the room. "We'll see who moves on," he whispered as he passed.


	2. Sub Rosa

Could have been easier on you  
I couldn't change though I wanted to  
Could have been easier by three  
Our old friend fear and you and me

_\--Bush, Glycerine_

 

"I guess that's the last of it," Willow said, nodding at Xander as he came through the door with the heaviest of the boxes, the one with all the magic books.

Why wasn't someone with preternatural strength carrying this? It seemed grossly unfair. He was sure Buffy and Spike were both carrying boxes filled with dishtowels or hair clips or something.

"About bloody time," Spike muttered behind him, and Xander noticed that Buffy had hurled herself onto the couch with a big "whew!" and a drink already in hand. The two men clomped up the stairs to Joyce's old room where Willow, Tara, and Dawn were deciding where to hang the pictures. He was glad they had so much to occupy themselves with instead of carrying heavy stuff. Anya had done the smart thing and stayed home, while Giles was taking care of the food responsibilities, leaving the rest of them, naturally, as the knuckle-draggers.

Spike unceremoniously dumped the last two boxes of CDs and tapes on the bed, pulled his cigarettes out of his pocket and put one in his mouth, then clomped back down the stairs to the living room. He'd been doing that a lot lately, sticking a cig in his mouth but not bothering to light it. Must be for Buffy's sake, Xander thought, going downstairs after him, and that thought annoyed him. Anything Spike did for Buffy's sake annoyed him, his whole delusional refusal to admit Buffy would never care for him.

Giles had the foresight to have pizza waiting for them. Xander dug into a large Meaty Man Special. Meat was designed to remind you you were a man, if you asked him. "How did they ever get that much stuff into a dorm room together?" Xander commented.

Buffy said, "I didn't think it was that much, really. Mostly stuff like what I'd have if I moved out." She played with a long string of cheese that dangled between her mouth and the pizza slice. "Mmm. Giles, you have outdone yourself. This is your true calling -- Man of Pizza."

"Then my work here is done," Giles said dryly. "I'm glad my training with the council and years at university provided me with a true purpose."

"Aren't the new residents and Dawnster hungry?" Xander asked.

"I imagine there are decorative throw pillows to sort out and scented candles to be artfully arranged," Giles sighed, looking at the ceiling.

"Are they really doing that?" Xander asked Buffy, eye following Giles's to the ceiling even though he didn't know why.

"Yes, because with my special Slay-o-Vision, I can see through walls." She spread her hands wide in bafflement. "I don't know what they're doing. Probably just enjoying the whole new home thing."

"This was always a woman's house, but the estrogen level in here is gonna be thick as the fog in Old Blighty now," Spike commented. Buffy scowled.

But Xander laughed. "Testify, brother."

They exchanged shocked glances with each other, not accustomed at all to agreeing, let alone finding something that would result in a kind of simpatico male bonding.

Buffy glowered at them both. After eating for awhile, Giles motioned for her to follow him into the kitchen. He was making that face at her again, the same one he'd worn after their battle with Glory. In her dreams lately she'd been completely alone. Small details in her dreams meant something larger; prescient dreams seemed to come with the slayer package.

"You have that awful face again," she said to him as he took a drink from the refrigerator.

"Why, thank you," Giles responded acidly.

She sat on the counter. "You know what I mean. That face that says you're going to tell me bad news." For a while they didn't say anything, just stared at their pop cans, until Buffy finally said, "You're really going to leave, aren't you?"

Just saying those words was like slashing into her own heart; she couldn't breathe for the pain.

"Yes. I believe it's time, Buffy." Giles took off his glasses and looked at her intently. The corners of her mouth arced downward, heat creeping into her throat as she tried not to cry. "It isn't that I prefer to leave, it's that I've watched you grow beyond anything I have to offer, and now there's Willow and Tara helping you here. Everything I could have hoped for, you've exceeded. I believe... you've exceeded me." His smile was meant to be kind and reassuring.

*No grow. Shout.* Buffy took a drink, trying to focus on something else.

"I'm not. I haven't exceeded anything. How can you leave me after I've lost so much?"

"Believe me, I've thought about this a long time. I'd actually planned to go last year, but you wanted to learn how to push your skills even higher so I stayed. But don't you see, Buffy? You have pushed your skills. You've defeated a god, and you've endured the death of your mother with maturity and resolve, and all the things you are now, those are beyond my teachings."

"Giles. You're... you're my father now."

"And fathers have to let go, eventually."

She had succeeded beyond most other slayers. There was not a lot of arguing against that. "If a slayer got to my age before, did their watchers leave them too?"

Giles laughed at that, a sad little laugh that usually meant he saw right through her. "I don't know. But I can tell you this -- no one had a slayer as exceptional as the one I've had. So there would be no precedent."

"I hate it when you're complimentary and I can't keep my bad moodiness."

They sat for awhile, not speaking, until Buffy suddenly hugged him. He held her as tightly as he could, listening to her sniffle.

How much of this was about her fear of the future, and how much about her past? Or maybe her reaction was something else -- she'd looked anguished lately, tired and indifferent, although her nightly patrolling hadn't suffered at all.

"Are you... have you been feeling all right?" he asked.

"I just... I keep having bad dreams about that night." Buffy pulled away from him, pushing fingers against her temples.

"I shouldn't wonder." Giles had to hope and trust -- not something he ever thought he'd associate with Spike -- that the vampire had not said anything to Buffy about Ben. "The fear and adrenaline alone... it could take weeks for you to recover, and on top of that your mother's death was a huge blow."

She shrugged. "It's more than that. I just... I keep feeling like it's not over. That something else was supposed to happen there, and it didn't, and something else will take its place. Do you believe much in prophecies?"

Smiling, Giles said, "I believe that some prophecies are vague and can be ignored, and others...." They both sat up straighter, looking at their hands, remembering the night he'd told her of the Master.

Buffy couldn't look at Giles, just stared out the window. She wished she could explain it to him, but if she tried, then he'd think she was using it as a ploy to keep him here. "I hope the vague point is right," she said distantly. "So, when is this... when are you going to leave me? Here. Us. Arg."

"Not for a while yet. I'm going to make Anya a partner in the Magic Box, which as you can imagine will involve nightmarish discussions of money and so much paperwork that I'll ask you to cut off my head to end the pain. I was thinking by end of summer. That way you and I can train and figure a plan for you and Dawn. And you know that you can call me at any time, day or night, for help. I won't abandon you, ever. You're too important to me."

That was all it took to send her over the edge and she burst into tears. Giles pulled her close again, there-thereing and patting her head.

"I never thought I'd lose you. Not really. In my mind, I was always 17 and you were always here and we were always together." She wiped tears away and tried to smile. "I guess I'm just tired and afraid. I'll try to do better."

"Buffy, is Spike bothering you? Is that adding to your stress? He's been obsessed with you for some time, but I would expect he's taking advantage of his new status with Dawn and with you, which would only make this all much worse."

"Because obviously my willingness to let him hang here indicates some kind of blunt trauma to my head!" she said in a mock-perky voice. It annoyed her that everyone assumed she wasn't strong enough to deal with Spike on his own terms, or that she was stupid enough to be his victim. "Why does everyone think Spike is bothering me?" she snapped.

"My mistake." Giles wondered if there was more going on than she would say. He could sense a growing dependence on Spike, the way they patrolled together almost nightly now, the quickness with which she stepped in when someone in the group ignored him or abused him. It had gone beyond mere gratitude.

"He's not bothering me. He's just... he really stepped up to the plate when I needed him to. A lot of times. And he isn't what's making me feel like this."

"Then for that I'm grateful. But... you have to remember one thing about him. He is still a vampire and he is still evil."

This time she wouldn't look at him at all, and Giles knew he'd lost that part of her. Whatever Spike was doing to worm his way into her heart, it was working, even if she didn't know it herself.

"Well! We should get back to the rest of them."

"Are you going to tell them?" Buffy asked sadly. "I don't think I can."

"Yes, of course I will. Not immediately, but very soon. I want... I want us, you and me, to adjust to it first."

Life without Giles. Without Mom. Without Angel. The Bataan death march of those who loved her. Buffy felt angry and betrayed and more alone than she'd ever thought possible. If they don't die, they leave me. Emotional death.

Death is my gift.

Buffy looked up at Giles, startled. "What?"

For a moment he seemed confused. "I... I was just saying that perhaps we should wait until at least after Dawn's party. It's a big event for her, I don't want to lessen it."

"Sure." They got up, but she was distracted now. "Sure."

As they left, neither saw that Spike was standing around the corner, listening. Digging around in his pocket for the lighter, he laughed quietly. So the watcher's leaving for good. This summer was starting to look more and more promising all the time.

 

 

Buffy kicked hard at the eight-clawed paw that held her other leg, but the paw still wasn't budging. She screamed for Spike, only he was over at the tail end bellowing and flailing around, mired in his own trouble. He'd landed a blow on the oozing sticky stuff that came out of the axe wound and now his hand was stuck in it. If she had a choice, Buffy would pick Glory over this disgusting, huge, pink Kr!kegn demon any day. Its name was as annoying as it was; no one could even pronounce it so they just called it the krack demon. Which was fitting since it seemed hopped up enough to be on crack. Or did you get all zonked out on crack? Buffy couldn't remember.

Then she kicked again and dislodged its meaty paw, as big as her whole head if you weren't counting the six-inch claws, and ran for the double-headed axe. She was going to take the demon down if it killed her. Nothing was going to get away with eating dogs -- puppies! -- and cats in *her* town, dammit.

From far away she heard Spike shouting again as he frantically pulled on his arm, trying not to get crushed if the demon rolled over on top of him. It was as big as a mini-van, so that was a definite danger.

Finally he pulled free. "Hah! Try that again, you mutant Barney!" He was about to land a two-footed kick when he leapt backwards, thinking it might be wiser not to do that. There could be more ooze. Getting both feet stuck wouldn't just put him in a painful spot, it would be incredibly undignified.

"You're not trying hard enough," Buffy shouted at him.

"I bloody well am! I don't have to be here, you know. You're the one sent me packing with 'it was a mistake,' but then you come over all weepy and moany about how much you need me to stop the demon from eating all the widdle puppies and kitties." He found a dry spot on its pink hide and landed a roundhouse kick, but the gargantuan tail flicked out and dropped him on his bum.

Buffy tried not to laugh; this was serious, after all. "I'm only saying," she commented, swinging the axe at its head but hitting the carapace on its neck instead, the axe reverberating in her hands. "We can move on. We're adults. Some of us are more adult then others, true, but we're still both grown-ups and we have to put it behind us." She swung again, lower, and the krack demon howled in pain, its tail and paws flailing wildly.

Spike huffed and jumped up, then ran over to pick up the sword. "Move on, my arse."

The demon knocked the axe out of Buffy's hands. "Ow!" This was just making her mad -- Spike bickering with her, not concentrating, and this stupid, smelly, pink demon with sticky ooze refusing to give up and die.

Just as Spike swung the sword with perfect aim towards the unprotected lower neck, the demon's tail stabbed Spike through the upper thigh, impaling him. He roared in pain, vamping out, but kept his act together as the sword went in and he shoved it all the way through.

"See?" Buffy hollered above all the squealing and yelling. "You're not paying attention. Oof!" she grunted, while she whacked with the axe one last time, and the monster went down, at last. Nearby Spike writhed and moaned.

"I would have had this thing down in five minutes if it wasn't for you waving your saucy tits in my direction and licking your pouty lips. Ow-OOWW! You fucking bitch!" he bellowed again as she yanked the stabbing end of the demon's tail out of Spike's thigh.

"Stop talking about my body parts," she threatened, "or I'll stab you with this again." But it was an idle threat, she could hardly lift the tail with both hands let alone stab anyone.

Spike clutched at his thigh and rolled around on the ground.

During the fight with the krack demon, somehow they'd made their way down alleys and back streets to the end of town. Now she realized they stood not far from where they'd battled Glory. Above her, a few hundred yards away, rose the tower where Dawn had been taken as offering.

She dropped her weapons as she walked forward, mesmerized. Still standing even now. What had she expected? That it would have simply dematerialized just because the dimensional rift hadn't opened?

Death is your gift. That was where it was supposed to really happen. The dreams that flooded her mind, dark visions that on the surface felt similar, but were different enough to be frightening. Dropping off the top of the tower into something hot and painful. Dawn bleeding and screaming and crying. Dying -- either Dawn or herself, she couldn't remember. Everyone dying.

Spike struggled to his feet and saw Buffy staring motionless up at the tower, giving off the scent of fear. He'd hardly ever smelled it on her. In the past he would have grown impossibly intoxicated by that scent, primal and hungry. Driving his fangs out and his dick upright.

"Slayer." He said it quietly, coming up behind her. Afraid to startle her out of her reverie. Or maybe he should -- this didn't seem so good to him. "Slayer, you okay?"

She didn't respond. He looked up at the tower silhouetted against the pale moon. Should have knocked the bloody thing down when he had the chance. What was she so afraid of here? She'd racked up the victory notch on the hell bitch, so what could scare her about this rickety old thing?

"Something bothering you? Something I can help with?" Spike reached out and lightly touched her shoulder. His wobbly legs left him barely able to stand at this point. Buffy jumped and whirled around, fists up, leading with her right and keeping her left behind it. Much as he wished for a good tussle with the girl -- even if he didn't have a chip -- he wasn't up for it now with half his thigh turned to hash.

Dropping her fists, she watched him intently, as if ready to say something. But she stopped and looked off in the middle distance. Dammit, he just hated it when people did that. It was too teasing.

"You need to talk about something, looks to me. I'm just saying."

She shook her head and stretched her hand towards him. "Oh God, you're wounded, I forgot. I'm sorry."

"What is it about the tower that's got you hypnotized?" He wasn't in the mood to let her change the subject. It was irrelevant if she didn't think of him as friend enough to confide in, he would bully his way to her trust. Use the heavy boots.

"Nothing. I just can't believe it's still standing. I guess I thought..." her words drifted away. "I thought the minions or whatever they were would have torn it down or something. Look, let's get you back to your crypt. Do you think you can walk?"

"Course I can. It's just gammy, I'm not going to die or anything."

"Don't audition at the Comedy Store with that act. It's not just old, it wasn't funny the first time." Buffy grabbed his arm and hauled it across her shoulders, supporting him as they limped along through the streets.

That was certainly much more appealing than he could have hoped for, and he threw in a few groans of pain and extra stumbles just so he could stay close to her. She smelled wonderful: a lovely minty lavender aroma that vaguely reminded him of home.

When they reached the crypt Buffy helped him up on top of a bier. Her air was distracted, her gaze inward.

The place was in a state of disarray with clothing, books, and bottles scattered here and there. Light entered from the high barred windows open to the bright moonlight, casting shadows of midnight and grey across the floor and furniture. On top of the tomb Spike had left a blanket and sheets made into a makeshift bed, and a pillow with a shiny satin cover at the head of it. The small refrigerator hummed in the background.

"Do you have anything here to bandage that? Or disinfect it?" Buffy asked.

He laughed softly, touched by her kindness but treading gingerly so as not to provoke her. "I'm not going to get a staph infection, you know, Pet. Won't get gangrene."

Her frown was so adorable, the way her mouth pulled tight and her forehead wrinkled. "Fine, have it your way. But at least let's bandage it. And no, I'm not telling you to take off your pants."

"Well, I couldn't, anyway. Or at least you really wouldn't want that." He pointed at the T-shirt Anya had destroyed, lying on the floor in the corner. She picked it up and tore it into strips, then squinted at him as if she'd just gotten a joke.

"You're commando?" Buffy grimaced and dropped the shirt.

Laughing, he said, "What did you expect?"

"God, Spike. Every time I think you can't be any ickier, you find new depths."

"Why so offended? So bloody what?" He shifted closer to her, tilting his head to the left. "Don't tell me that's so unusual. You're no blushing virgin." She could feel heat from him, which seemed wrong somehow because he was, after all, cold and dead. But there was something about how he moved, the way he talked to her sometimes that felt heated. The sexy low voice, the way he spoke so close to her skin that it was like being touched by the softest fingertips, stroking...

"It's just way TMI, that's all. Look, why don't you... just fix yourself, then?" But his leg looked awful, and she felt guilty for being bitchy when he'd done so much for her lately. For all of them.

"Oh, just turn around and hide your baby... hazels." She turned away and heard him undoing the buttons and sliding the jeans off. "All right, now you can play Florence Nightingale." He'd taken down just one leg of his jeans and draped the blanket he'd been sitting on over his lap, beaming smugly at her. Daring her.

"Fine." Buffy started cleaning up the mess. His thigh looked like a ground-beef patty about four square inches. "How does someone who's basically dead lose so much blood?"

"Saw plenty of blood on Angel after a fight, I'd imagine. You didn't get the undead anatomy lesson then?"

She raked the cloth over his wound and he howled in pain.

"Serves you right, smartass." She continued, eyes focused solely on the wound, nothing else. He had very nice thigh muscles and it was disconcerting to see them like this, when they were so close and so... physical. "So, why does something that huge and graced with sticky goo you can't get your fist out of go for something like dogs and cats instead of humans? Seems kinda... inefficient."

"Blowed if I know. Some demons have specific things they're sort of programmed to eat. Maybe it just likes the small snacks, and lots of 'em -- you know, like popcorn chicken or something. Tender little bite-size morsels, just waiting to be popped in the mouth and swallowed down..."

"Ew, Spike! What is wrong with you? They were defenseless little dogs and cats!"

"I'm a vampire. I eat defenseless little things, or at least I used to until they took me to the reprogramming center."

When he said things like that, Buffy wondered if he knew what he was doing. Every time he reminded her of who he was she felt repulsed by the growing friendship between them.

She finished wiping away the blood and krack monster goo, then tied the strips of her makeshift bandage around his thigh.

"Be right as rain in no time." He flexed his leg and motioned for her to turn around. As soon as her back was turned, though, he grimaced in pain, the throbbing and burning even worse now that it was all cleaned up and goo-free. He could barely find the strength to stand and put his jeans back on.

When she turned around he wobbled backwards and she caught him by the shoulder. She helped lift him back up on the bier, while he pressed his hands onto the wound. After he finally stopped seeing stars he looked at Buffy, who was frowning.

"Right as rain, my--"

"Lovely sweet pure mouth."

Narrowed eyes looked suspiciously at him. "How weak are you? And I mean that in a don't lie to me you half-witted macho moron way."

"Hurts enough. Look, I hate to ask this, but... I need something to eat."

Buffy just looked at him dully for awhile before asking, "In the fridge?"

He nodded. Why did he feel he should apologize for eating? "How many times did you bring Angel something? Watch him eat?" Spike snapped. God, he hated losing what incredibly short grip on his temper he had. It only gave her more to hang her rage and loathing on. But he couldn't stand the disdain for what he was when she herself had put up with anything for sodding Angel.

Handing him a glass of something -- pig, from the smell of it -- she then kept her eyes trained on the floor while he drank.

"That was different," she said huffily after awhile.

"Is that right? Because he had a soul?"

"Yes."

Spike barked out a laugh. Feeling better with the blood in his stomach and a little adrenaline from annoyance, he stood in front of her, closing the distance. She didn't back away. "Slayer. Have you ever thought you give having a soul a little too much credit?" He took her hands in his, running his thumbs over hers, along the edges of her wrists. "A lot of humans had souls who were evil. Thousands more famous than Hitler or Stalin. Serial killers have souls. Torturers. Rapists." He pulled her hands up in front of his and she held them out as if saying stop. Spike softly raked his fingernails down along her fingers and palms, then twined his fingers through hers.

"But you're evil because you're soulless. There's a difference between having a soul and behaving inhumanly, and not being human at all." Her breath was off, she couldn't quite get it to work right as it hitched and turned in her throat. The way he was touching her... how did he know all these ways to touch her that knocked the wind out of her, harder than a punch from a krack demon?

"No, there's not, luv. You make a choice. I don't have a soul, and yeah, sometimes I forget the rules. But I made a choice not to act on the evil thing. Evil humans with souls made a choice not to act on the good thing." He wrapped his hands around her tiny wrists, moving his thumb back and forth along the inside of them, the veined translucent skin pulsing with her life.

He could see it in her eyes, the way her lids had nearly closed, flickering as he touched her. She was melting for him, her resolve and distance vanishing in the wave of desire she so desperately didn't want to feel.

"But no one can trust you..." Her eyes closed completely as he ran the backs of his fingers across her palms.

"Now I hear your watcher talking. I know what he's telling you, that I'm doing all this to use and abuse you. That I can't really love you, because.... oh! that pesky soul thing again." Spike traced fingers across her palms, around the backs of her hands, feathering over her skin. Nerve endings so alive he expected to see sparks on their flesh here in the darkness.

From a dark space in the back of her mind she recalled Xander, angry and hurt, saying "I guess a guy's gotta be undead to make time with you." She jerked her hands away from his.

"Giles is right," she snapped. Spike wore that kicked look. The one that shredded her insides despite her best efforts to the contrary. "You don't even really know what love is. You've tried to kill me, but now you can't, so you turn it into something else. Obsession."

Instead of arguing he laughed low in his chest, lifted her onto the edge of the tomb, and started doing that thing with his hands again. God, it was driving Buffy insane, wanting to run from him and at the same time feeling the long-missed fire start between her legs and spread up through her body. He did things with just his hands that other lovers hadn't been able to do with their entire bodies.

"Did you ever consider," Spike whispered, pressing himself against her, fingers twining through hers, "that we haven't succeeded in killing each other for a reason? We've both had ample opportunity. Why haven't we? Because something in our unconsciouses knew."

The pressure of his body pushed her legs apart and he moved forward, her thighs on either side of him. She closed her eyes, unwilling to look at him this close again. Wanting not to listen. The way his voice slid sensually along her skin, slipped inside her ears with a shivery touch.

The disgust and loathing of her friends over what she was doing now was almost tangible, their faces etched with disapproval in her mind's eye. "I drove a stake into you once. I would have then." Words torn out of her mouth only in ragged whispers now.

"Even though you knew it wouldn't work -- I was standing in the sunlight. You had to know I was protected." Spike leaned closer and raised her left arm, pressing his lips to the inside of her wrist. "And I always had to say something, stop and gloat so you got away. Never did that with anyone else. Ever. I just killed them." As he unbuttoned her jacket, she idly thought that now would be a very good time to get off this tomb and leave here forever. Yet somehow the jacket slid off and his hands were moving up her arms under the sleeves of her blouse, and here she still was.

"I wanted to kill you. You should have... you should have been dead a long time ago. You don't kill just to feed, you kill because you enjoy it. You got off on killing slayers." Her voice was twisted with petulance. Spike leaned forward and kissed along her collarbone, hands gripping her elbows. "You... you were going to let the Judge kill me."

"Oh, that. Well, I wasn't on my game. A bit testy since you'd left me to die in a fire. Not to mention that dodgy wheelchair and the peer pressure."

He smiled and then kissed her ear, tongue slithering along the edge like a serpent. Buffy shivered. The tingling heat between her legs was a five-alarm fire now. "See? You would have killed me. Just like the others. Nothing special."

"All your watcher books like to talk about that, don't they? Bet they don't mention the one slayer who kicked my ass quite efficiently, thank you very much, and I bet they've not updated to mention you and how thoroughly you've reformed me."

How did Buffy make them mesh -- the vampire who'd gleefully said, "Dru bagged a slayer!" about his world-destroying girlfriend and the one standing in front of her, making her melt her like hot wax? Who'd saved her sister and the world?

"The only thing they'll probably write about me in the watcher histories is that I'm the slayer who boinked two vampires." As soon as the words were out of her mouth she was trapped in the horror of what she'd just given away. Take it back! take it back now!

Yet Spike didn't acknowledge her admission. His hands on her arms clenched tighter, but otherwise he didn't move except to kiss the base of her throat. Even knowing he couldn't bite her she felt vulnerable to him, opened up to show her softest parts, her fears. Her legs weren't on either side of his body anymore, instead they were wrapped around his waist; hands on his chest. Oh dear. This was not good.

Spike threaded his fingers in her hair and pulled her mouth to his, kissing her hard. The night was soundless except for the papery sounds of the soft wind rustling of the leaves.

She could have stopped it by now and left, yet here she was, still kissing him. Her fingers dug into his chest and he relished the pain, the way it counterpointed the screaming fire in his thigh and the burning sweetness of her mouth. Her tongue twisting with his, running along his teeth. It was as if she hadn't been kissed in years. The way her legs tightened around him made the heat race from his groin to his head, dizzying him. Spike pushed her back and clambered up on the tomb.

The heel of one of her suede boots dug into the back of his injured thigh. He was drowning again in her wet, hard kisses and the dick-hardening noises coming from the back of her throat. God, she was positively gagging for it, urging him on with mews of desire. He reached down and unzipped the boot, sliding it off -- really, there was only so much pain a bloke could take in one night -- then the other one, running his hand along each foot and ankle slowly like he'd done the other day. She made a little "guh" sound; he could have come just from that alone. Spike looked down at her, mauve lips parted and moist from the kissing. What he wouldn't give to see her starkers, wearing just those kitten-heeled boots and a smile.

They were chiaroscuro, light and dark, the two of them together. Radiant hair limning her face as she lay back on the marble, a wreath of it fanning out around her. He should have been an artist, not a poet. If he was a painter he'd scumble the lines a bit, soften them to reflect her inner light. Buffy the work of art. A Dewing painting, all colors and softness and light, light, light diffusing into his darkness.

Spike pushed the filmy, silky top up and kissed her stomach, stopping just under her breasts. The first time he'd seen Buffy he'd watched with malignant fascination as she danced seductively with her friends, barely wearing the tiny top that clung to her body, revealing just enough to tease mercilessly. Thinking that before he killed her he wanted to roughly fondle and suck those firm tits. He could never tell her all the things he'd thought about her then; she wouldn't understand how differently he'd viewed her from other slayers.

Now she was looking at him, eyes open and burning, waiting. "God, I love you, Buffy," he groaned as he kissed her throat, behind her ears, her shoulders, before he finally made his way back to her willing mouth. She had entered him like a spirit, past the wall of blood and bone, filling him with her essence. It flared inside him like the corona of a sun, like a soul.

"Don't," Buffy whispered, "don't say it." She bit his lip and sucked hard on his tongue, pulling him on top of her. He slid one side of her bra down, freeing her breast to take it in his mouth, tongue circling the nipple as it hardened. A keening sound came from her throat while she held his head tightly against her. Reaching under he undid her bra with deft fingers, sliding it up out of the way, sucking her other breast hard while he unzipped her trousers.

She must feel his throbbing prick against her now and know how mad with desire he was. This was the flashpoint where he lost all restraint, but she didn't reject him in spite of his urgency. Signaled him instead to continue his worship of her body. The feel of hips moving beneath him and the way her hands clutched were more than he'd ever dreamt of in the fantasies that accompanied his own pathetic pleasuring. Almost like fighting, the girl was so strong and powerful, could move as no human could. He'd expected Buffy to be a total raver in the sack, but now she was confirming it for him in the most delicious way.

Lips trailed across her stomach, down, down, until his mouth reached her pubic bone. The wetness inside her filled his nostrils and he mouthed her pussy through the fabric. She twitched and jerked under him as he slid a hand under the waistband, using his other hand to stroke one of her nipples. The scent of her racing blood made his cock ache. "Spike," she whispered hoarsely, and his mind was filled with music. He crawled back up and over her, cock pressing hard against her thigh.

Spike lifted his head to smile down at her, stroking her gossamer hair and winding his fingers through it. There was a spiral galaxy in her eyes, pinpoints of light that swirled through the pupil, taking him to far distances where feelings were measured in light years.

"At least this is one vampire you won't live to regret boinking." He leaned down to kiss her again, but her hand came up in front of his mouth. Holding it there for a moment as she turned her face, Buffy finally pushed him backwards, then sat up, adjusting her bra and blouse. She wouldn't look at him.

Spike sat back, eyes narrowed in anger and bafflement.

Buffy hopped off the bier and put her boots on, then grabbed her leather jacket and shrugged it back on. If she looked at him she might crack, all the events of the past few months and his role in them churning around in her brain, a cyclone of confusion. Knowing he'd saved her, that it had been his choice, yet knowing he was the same cruel, nasty thing he'd always been \-- and that he could never, would never change.

With a half turn but still not looking at him she said, "I didn't even intend to patrol tonight when I came to see you. I came because next weekend we're having a birthday party at the Bronze for Dawn."

"D'you want me there?" he asked into his hands, voice muffled.

"She will. I couldn't care less."

Spike didn't say anything as Buffy turned around and left. How stupid to fall for his tricks, to let loneliness and gratitude cause her to drop her guard. Giles was right, he was manipulating her. Now he had extra leverage, having seen how physically desperate she was. Spike had always had that weird ability to know what was going on with people, to see something in them they didn't see themselves. Like picking up a radar signal. He'd read there were tender spots in her armor to chip away at and he was masterful in his work.

Buffy walked back to the house hoping that no one was waiting up. She didn't want to talk. It was hard enough trying to keep up the strong slayer act with her constant fear that something was unfinished with Glory. Now her weakness with Spike weighed her heart down further. At the edge of the street she looked towards the south end of town, trying to see if she could spot the top of the tower. It wasn't visible from this distance.

Tomorrow she'd have to talk with Giles about finding a way to tear it down.

 

 

After Buffy left, Spike sat motionless for a long while with his head in his hands. In one hundred and twenty years he hadn't felt like crying, but in the comparatively short amount of time he'd known Buffy Summers he appeared to be constantly on the verge of bawling like a baby. Tears of rage, tears of pain, didn't matter really -- they appeared too often, stinging behind his eyes, streams of emotion threatening to overspill their banks. He reeked of desperation, the stench of humanity and lovesickness clinging to him, oozing from his pores.

And Christ, when would he learn to leave Angel out of it? Shut. Your. Gob. Spike.

These past few years he'd learned to live with the chip. Unhappily, but resigned to his fate. Like anyone learning to live with a disability, it had forced him to view the world differently. You looked at things one way when you had power, and another when you didn't. He wanted it out, without question, but not for the same reasons now as he'd wanted it out then. Not so he could kill with impunity, but simply so he could taste his own free will again.

Spike went out to the cemetery, past a small grove of trees to a bench hidden among some shrubs, where a small man-made pond glittered darkly nearby. All in loving memory of one Eloise Wallace, and his favorite quiet place. Lighting a cigarette, he lay back on the cold stone, aching leg stretched out and coat draped over the sides like bat wings. The sky was cloudless above him; he lay there and puffed on his cigarette, contemplative, counting the stars. The smoke curled up into the sky. He could see Buffy's face up there, her eyes in the stars.

It had taken him years to cultivate this persona, this version of himself he called Spike. The entire Superfriends gang seemed to believe that a demon took over your body and all your human characteristics were gone -- poof! \-- the minute you woke up without your soul. It amused Spike how naïve they were, and that Angel had never explained the truth of it (of course, why would he? It would shatter their illusions that he could be trusted, that they could be safe with the great ponce). It was easier for them to kill a vamp thinking there was nothing left resembling those human elements still resident inside, sharing space with the new demon inhabitant. It had taken him years to overcome the characteristics of William that still twittered and flitted in the back of his mind -- the melancholy, the romantic notions, the sensitivity. Spike was his way of hardening himself, toughening against the cruel lessons of Angelus and Darla, of Dru's unabated adoration for Angelus, of his vestigial memories of William. Creating a new man by creating Spike had helped him cast off everything from his past.

He could have settled with just being a demon version of himself. Angelus, Darla, Dru, most of the other vampires he met were only that -- themselves, without the burden of empathy, conscience, humanity. But that wasn't good enough for him, he wanted to use this new strength and rage, be the things he'd feared when he was human. Be a monster, revel in it. The accent, the language, the attitude embodied pure animal rage for him. He'd let Angelus beat the living shit out of him over and over so he could learn, by necessity, to fight -- and fight better. He'd turned killing into art -- oh, not Angelus's cack-handed, phony version of "artistry," which was a code word for nancing about and not getting the job done, but a ballet of violence and blood and lust. And all of this he did of his own free will, all of it he *created* with his hands and his mind. He was a self-made man. Self-made vampire. Whatever.

But now... the chip had taken away Spike's free will, forced him to create another persona, another version of himself that he hadn't wanted. It was in slowing his life down, taking everything he loved away that the chip had shoved him into human contact and knocked down the walls between his world and theirs. Enough so that his feelings bled over into their world and his obsession with the slayer mutated into something else. If he'd never been stopped like that, reined in, then all Dru's dire predictions of his feelings for Buffy would have been meaningless.

And Buffy would never believe that, never believe that his feelings were real. He didn't have the knowledge of how to act human, yet was forced to interact with humans on their terms. Whenever he transgressed and reminded them of who he was, they rejected him. It was only when they could skip past what he was that they gave him the chance to overcome it. Only he didn't want to overcome being a vampire, no matter how much Buffy might want him to.

It was like looking in a mirror -- Spike couldn't see what they thought of him, no image reflected back. Nothing clear, anyway. They hated and accepted him, needed and rejected him, but would not let him see what they really expected from him.

It didn't matter what he did, his past actions -- torturing Angel, leaving Willow and Xander for dead, trying to kill Buffy -- came into focus for them like a photograph, indelibly preserved on their minds. But those sepia-toned pictures weren't who he was anymore. They didn't want to add new images of saving the world from Acathla, of rescuing Dawn, of standing up to Glory.

She would never want to believe that he loved her. To do that would be to accept that he was more than simply an evil, soulless demon. To admit that vampires could embody elements of their human life. She could accept that he was sexually attracted to her, and she could maybe, someday, admit her own attraction to him, but love... that would be out of the question, and the more he said things like he had tonight, the more ammunition she had against him and the persona he'd created. He couldn't go backwards, not to William, but bits of William still popped up now and then, leaving him feeling hurt and helpless and worthless. All these decades spent trying to eradicate every trace of himself and those traces still came back and bit him in the arse. He was just a lovesick vampire, without hope and alone, no different than he'd been as a human.

If he could create one persona, though, why not another? Was he completely powerless just because of this sodding chip? If he had his own free will again, he could show her at last. Show her that he was doing this because he wanted to, because he loved her. She would see him, see all of him. Not the empty space in the glass where a reflection should be, but him, the real him, with its bits of Spike and William and something else, some alchemic mix of them both. The one who loved Buffy.

Eventually he got up off the bench. In his crypt he took a bottle of the good stuff he kept hidden away, peaty and smoky and a reminder of where he'd come from and what he'd left. After knocking back at least a third of the bottle while he stared glumly at the blank TV, he gingerly climbed down the ladder and hurled himself onto the bed, his leg and head throbbing. Heading for the mercy of oblivion.

In one of her more lucid moments, Dru had told him of the slow mental torture Angel inflicted on her before making her a vampire. Spike had asked, with the naiveté of the acolyte, why she had let Angel drag her so far down into the darkest depths. She told him in a sing-song voice "It takes a great deal if you're a good person to pull someone up from the depths of depravity into your world. But it takes almost no effort at all for a bad person to drag you down to their level."

Did Buffy believe something like that now? Was that what they told her \-- that he was tarnishing her goodness? He'd handed her confirmation on a platter. All because he couldn't keep his smug, stupid gob shut. Or maybe it was postponing the inevitable. If they'd continued on tonight, later she would be filled with self-loathing, hating him even more. Believing that he'd been the one to drag her down, just because she owed him something for saving Dawn's life.

The dregs of the bottle appeared dark crimson, sanguinary in the lightless cavern. So much he'd lost, so much given up to stay here with her. There were ways he could prove himself. Then she could see he didn't save Dawn just to impress or manipulate her. It was simply a matter of greasing palms, chanting the right chants with the right spooks, passing the required tests. There were people and demons alike who could nullify the chip with the right incantations or spells. Hell, Willow could probably do it, but she'd never help him, not after all he'd done to her.

No. No no no no. He wasn't powerless, wasn't helpless. Mistakes were made, his memories of how to act this role were frayed by time and the loss of conscience and soul, but he could work the kinks out of the system given time. The twitch of fear that Giles made, the grim anxiety from Harris, the way the witches fretted over his feelings... he did still have the power to scare them, in a deeper, darker way. It wasn't the demon face that frightened them, it was the trace of humanity left in him, the one that Buffy was drawn to, the one Dawn could see. That's what they were all so afraid of. And what Buffy feared most -- he could tell by the tremble in her hands when she touched him and by the breathlessness of her kisses.

 

 

It was good to be back on the school campus again. Even though her past here was like a mirage now, all shimmery and surreal, not even touchable, she liked the image of Buffy, Girl Student. As if she could create a life not ordered by strange events and an even stranger cast of characters. She was easing back into it with only two classes in the slacker-heaven summer quarter.

Maybe no one would notice, she hoped, that she was normal again in name only. As normal as anyone could be with a sister created from pure energy, a vampire who was obsessed with her, a witch for a best friend, and another friend in love with a thousand-year old former demon. Hah! Take *that* fringe Goth kids who think you're so weird! I've been macking with vampires! My pointy sticks and bite marks top your black eyeliner and hair dye any day.

She spent her first lecture trying to keep her brain on the straight road and what the instructor was saying, but it kept taking that twisty turny path to Spike. Why hadn't she seen him for such a long time? Even when she patrolled near his crypt he didn't show, and it was so unlike him to pass up an opportunity to yammer at her about their "relationship." When he was melodramatic it wore down her patience. It wasn't like he'd been the one left feeling so dismal after his crappy remark. He probably hadn't even known what he'd said to make her leave. Buffy had thought about going back and telling him off, but it wouldn't matter -- he was incapable of understanding.

It wasn't like she hadn't tried to forgive him for who he was. Reconciling him into her life was important to Dawn and they both owed him a lot. If he would just stop acting like he knew that, it would be easier to let him in. Being back in school would help with the feelings she was so confused about, Buffy was absolutely sure. She'd meet some guys, nice guys she could see in daylight, who'd take her on... picnics. Yeah. Picnics. And for burgers and shakes, in a car, in daylight. Who'd have money for a date and didn't have the coppery taste of blood on their lips or smell of whiskey and cigarettes. Who would talk a slang she understood instead of saying things like Bob's your uncle and sod that for a lark.

Still... and yet. His face as she'd finally looked at him when they were kissing -- the bewildered stunned gratitude of the eyes like one of her own stakes. Sharp and breathtaking. Not many men would look at a woman as if she were descended from a heaven they had never imagined. As if they were now holy enough to see her light.

Such a knowing way of touching her, the pull that moved her to tell him everything she kept inside. If she imagined herself telling anyone about what troubled her it was never Giles or Willow, only Spike. If she'd believed she could share with him, though, that remark left Buffy with the aching knowledge of its impossibility. He was still the same inside no matter how much of a polish she tried to put on him in her wishful loneliness.

"He is still a vampire," Giles had said. No soul there. Not like Angel. No possibility of being her guardian angel. Not even a molecule of good.

The vampire in him that would never be worthy. The vampire who knew how to make her human heart vulnerable. How often as a demon had he done that? Seduction and sex, feeding and killing. It was sex and power, always would be. He knew how empty and alone she was, saw it eating her slowly from the inside. He could smell it. Then he would pounce, his hunter's instincts using it, working it like a predator's jaws working bone and sinew.

When the bell rang for her last class, she'd taken nothing out of the lectures. Notes, but no memory of having written them. Off to a real Buffy start at school, as usual. Will was going to be so disappointed in her. But it was just the first day at least; she still had time to get her mind on scholastic achievement and off of the hot undead.

Buffy left campus and walked through town, stopping at the Espresso Pump for coffee before heading home. It was wonderful to be anonymous here. No one shouted "Slayer!" at her or ran at her with pointy weapons, no one asked for help or expected her to fight. No one expected anything more than that she pay for her coffee. Buffy had come down firmly on the side of anonymity in the past year.

Sometimes, alone and tired, she wondered how her mom would have felt if she gave it all up and just became Buffy, Young Adult. Would Mom have thought she was shirking because Glory was taken care of? Or would she be happy her daughter was out of danger at last? It didn't matter, of course, she didn't know how to give it up, and with Giles leaving Buffy had to learn to deal with it on her own.

Tonight she had to see if Spike was all right. A break of a few days was good, but Buffy missed him when he wasn't around making rude and inappropriate comments and just being generally irritating. She'd grown so used to him in the past few months. Strange how such irritation can creep into your life and you become accustomed to it on a daily basis, even look for it when it's not there.

It was late when she went by his crypt. He didn't respond to her knock so Buffy opened the door and walked cautiously inside, calling his name. It wouldn't do to surprise him and end up with a crossbow pointed at her guts. But there was no answer from up top, and no answer when she went down underneath, either. It looked as if he hadn't been here in days, in fact. Most of his small stuff was missing; the fridge empty of both blood and beer.

Her heart went cold as she considered the possibility that he might have returned to Drusilla. Despite everything that had happened here, Dru would take him back, Buffy was sure of it. But he hadn't gone back when he had the chance. Why would he go now?

Because she'd pushed him away. Because he had no life anymore except for her and Dawn and couldn't live as a vampire or as a man. Because most of all he didn't know what to do to make her happy. She closed the door and stood for a moment, trying to stanch the melancholy that washed over her in a blue wave. No, he absolutely wouldn't have left without saying something to Dawn. Spike might walk out on Buffy if he felt desolate enough, but he couldn't have just left Dawn.

What could be more disturbing than to feel more comfortable with him by her side than without? That she'd come to depend on him in the way she'd depended on Angel or Riley? They'd at least had the whole responsibility guy thing down; Spike's entire being was the anti-responsibility guy. Buffy put her stake back in her pocket and turned in the direction of home. If he'd left without saying good-bye, she'd kill his ass just for making her miss him.

 

 

Xander was already irritated and they weren't even at the Bronze yet. Anya had told him three times since they set out from the apartment that he'd better get into a good humor or he'd ruin Dawn's party. It was just the idea of having Spike there, how they had to always include him these days or risk the Wrath of the Summerses, that got on his last nerve. And it wasn't like he had a lot of nerves left in regard to that guy to start with.

"The harder you and Giles try to warn Buffy away from him, the more likely she is to want to be with him," Anya said. "I've seen it a couple thousand times, believe me. It never ends well. Pain and recrimination and a lot of finger-pointing. You have to let Buffy decide her own course, and you will never convince Dawn that he isn't her hero, so you may as well give up that hopeless quest." She reached across the car seat and patted his arm. "I know you hate being replaced in her fickle teenage affections, but these things happen."

He parked the car and they went in to find Willow, Tara, and Dawn already there; Giles was over at the counter getting drinks. At least no sign of Spike yet. Maybe he really had skipped town like Buffy thought. Oh happy day, if that were true. Giles nodded at them as he came back to the table, and both Xander and Anya shouted "Happy birthday!" at Dawn while handing her presents. Dawn gave the obligatory squeal of recipient joy but told them she was waiting for Buffy to show before opening presents.

"She's making a quick patrol around town beforehand so she can stay and party tonight," Willow explained. Xander wondered briefly, though, if she wasn't out looking for Spike yet again.

Anya squeezed his arm and said to Willow, "He's very put out tonight because of the invitation to Spike. He wants to enjoy just one birthday celebration without the undead crashing the party."

"Okay, but maybe Spike won't be here," Willow replied. "Buffy said he's... oh well, never mind." She was looking past Anya's left shoulder to the door, where Spike had just slunk in. Looking kind of nice, Willow thought. He cleaned up well. Both Giles and Xander turned, frowning, and then turned back to her. It was funny in a not so funny way, to Willow's mind. The men in the group so jealously guarding Buffy and Dawn against Spike's evil intentions, yet the women all fairly accepting. She'd spoken of the changing dynamic between Buffy and Spike one night with Tara, and Tara had mentioned that when Buffy was with him, her aura changed for the better. After that Willow was far less inclined to keep Spike away. Whatever was bothering Buffy -- whether it was the loss of her mother or the fight with Glory or her new responsibilities -- when Spike was nearby, she seemed calmer and centered, and that could only be for the good. There were twinges of jealousy thinking Buffy might be happier confiding in Spike about her problems; but if he could help, then Willow wanted that more than first-class buddy status.

Dawn pulled up a chair and made room for Spike but he waved it off and stood behind her instead. He tossed an unwrapped box on the table and Dawn beamed up at him. Resting one hand on her shoulder, Spike leaned down and said, "Happy birthday, Popsicle. Sweet sixteen never looked so good on anyone."

Xander scowled. That just frosted his flakes. Spike as Mr. Smooth-talker, the Handyman with the phrase to turn them all dewy-eyed. Didn't they remember how evil he was? All the unspeakable things he'd done? And how come something so noxious had such a way with the ladies? Even Anya was smiling at him with that annoyingly flirty twinkle in her eye. Girls always fall for the bad boy, and of course Spike had those cheekbones that could arm a battalion. It wasn't entirely fair.

"Hello, Rupert," Spike said. "Chaperoning the kiddies?" There was an especially wicked gleam in his eyes.

Giles adjusted his glasses, cocking his head sideways before looking at Spike with disdain. "Yes, well, they do let me out of the rest home for special occasions, as long as I'm home before ten."

Spike just smiled his predator's smile, and Xander motioned for Giles to come with him to the bar. Giles, polite Brit that he was, asked Spike what he wanted to drink.

Spike watched them from out of his peripheral vision. They leaned against the bar, keeping an eye on him, no doubt hoping to come up with a plan of attack to get him out of Buffy and Dawn's life. That was all right with Spike; the harder they tried, the better off he'd be. One glance at Dawn's face told him everything he needed to know about his place in her life. Like she was carrying his own little Get Out of Jail Free card right in the palm of her pretty little hand.

Dawn turned to look up at him. "I'm glad you came," she said quietly under the music. "Buffy said you were just gone, and I was afraid..."

Spike reached down and pulled a lock of loose hair behind her ear. "Just a little holiday. Wouldn't leave you without a big teary scene, you know that. Lots of sniffles and tissue."

"Okay," she said shyly, and when he noticed the rest of them again, Willow, Tara, and Anya were staring all dreamy-like.

Spike rolled his eyes, leaned back against a post, and stuck his hands in his pockets, wondering if he should ask about Buffy. Only baby sis just told him more than she'd realized by telling him Buffy mentioned he'd been gone. That was a good sign. A little absence makes the cold slayer heart grow fonder.

"So when's cake and candles? And opening of pressies?"

"When Buffy gets here. She was going to do a quick patrol." Dawn shook her gifts.

"Mm. Didn't see her about. Seems pretty quiet since I got back."

"She said it's dead out there," Dawn commented and then giggled at her pun. Christ, she was cute when she was like that. Time was a ripe, virginal morsel like her would make him salivate at the thought of popping her cherry while she shrieked for mercy. Ripping her throat out as the blood bubbled through screams silenced by his mouth. Now he was a guardian angel and if any vamp even thought of touching her they'd find out the hard way just how Spike had made his reputation.

Returning with more drinks, Giles handed Spike's to him and sat down next to Dawn, while Xander took Anya out on the dance floor. None of them saw that Buffy had entered, standing in the shadows near the entrance, watching them.

Spike was slouched against a post, standing behind Dawn. So he was back and had shown up for the party after all. Maybe it wasn't exactly calling a truce between them, but he was telling her that he would not let bad feelings make him miss Dawn's party. He looked good, she thought. Something was different about him, his face softer, his body language looser and easier. And he looked... hot. A T-shirt Buffy hadn't seen before: dark blue, between cobalt and black, with long sleeves and... oh dear God, leather pants. What was it with soulless vampires and leather pants? Was it some kind of dress code of the undead? Obviously he wanted to send a message loud and clear.

It was enlightening to watch him when he didn't know he was being watched. When his Buffy behavior wasn't switched on. Of course he'd put on the polite show for everyone, but he acted way different if she was around. So Buffy hung back, watching him talk to Dawn, noting the friendly manner Willow and Tara showed. Giles was diffident -- no surprise there -- but the girls all had their attention trained solely on Spike and what he was saying.

God, Buffy hoped he wasn't telling them stories about her! Quickly she walked over to where they were, hoping to stop anything before it got started, but just before she reached them Spike had taken Dawn's hand to lead her out on the dance floor. Buffy stopped, keeping an eye on them.

Dawn's pearl face luminescent in the low light of the club, a glow generated solely by Spike's attentions, the gentlemanly way he took her arm. Reminding her of that night on the tower, how Spike had held the precious cargo of her sister, the flicker in her heart when for one brief moment she thought she could care for him. Why was it so hard to allow herself that feeling again?

Probably because he did horrible things right after those wonderful moments, said unforgivable words that reminded her of who and what he really was. Couldn't she move past that? She had with Angel when he came back. Forgiven him and herself for loving him still. Why couldn't she forgive Spike?

Willow and Tara waved her over and she sat down with them, nodding in Spike and Dawn's direction. "They look sweet together like that."

"She was so happy to see him. I think Xander's nose is out of joint now," Tara said.

"Oh, yeah. He's never handled the whole Dawn having a crush on Spike thing well. She was supposed to only have a crush on Xander," Buffy responded.

"To be honest, I think Xander's everything is out of joint where Spike's concerned," Willow commented. Giles just hmphed behind Buffy.

"Hello, Giles, glad to see you getting down with your funky self and being loose," Buffy said over her shoulder.

"A few more pints will help with that, I can assure you." He raised his cup. "Cheers."

"What did you get Dawn for her birthday?" Willow asked.

"Nothing special, just a new top. Money's not exactly overflowing into the Summers bank account." That draining tension come back to her every time she thought about it. These past few months Buffy had entered a territory she'd never intended to explore. Being responsible now for almost everything, the loss of her mom like the loss of a limb, a heart. Tonight would have been so different. Dawn's first real birthday with them as a family if Joyce had been here and the absence was unfillable.

When the song was over everyone came back to the table, and Willow went to the kitchen to signal them for the cake. It was an enormous pink thing with sixteen huge candles that Dawn dutifully blew out. Buffy's jealous heart ached at her happiness. She didn't have any responsibilities, just the love of friends and family, the comforting knowledge that she was secure in the world. Untroubled by nightmares like Buffy's own or the calamities of life. When she was sixteen, Buffy had seen the choices that awaited Dawn ripped from her hands.

When she glanced up she saw Spike watching her from his sentry post by the pillar. Buffy smiled at him, but he only cocked his head sideways in response, eyes soft and curious. She shivered and looked away.

"Attention, sports fans! Now is the hallowed time of the opening of the presents!" Xander roared, gleefully rubbing his hands together. Dawn giggled and hovered her hands above the pile, eyes closed as if divining the contents.

Much cake was served and eaten, conversation turned this way and that. The presents were opened with drawn-out fanfare. Dawn was a perfect giftee, squealing with delight for every trinket or article of clothing or CD that she opened. She had saved Spike's for last.

There was no regular card, just a tiny sticky note on it. Dawn read it and passed it to Buffy, who held it in her hand for a moment, staring at it until she finally passed it off to Willow. It said, "This doesn't open anything. It just is."

Dawn opened the small box. A miniature silver key hanging from a snakey silver necklace. She held her breath, wondering how everyone would take this, because most of them didn't get Spike even on a good day and they'd probably think he was being all snarky and mean. But Buffy got it. Her mouth was open a little and she was looking up at Spike with something Dawn hadn't really seen before on her sister's face -- gratitude. And that was a relief, really, because she wanted Buffy to stop pushing Spike away like the clueless dork she was.

Dawn turned to Spike, tried not to get all weepy because he'd hate that and say something cutting. "It's perfect. Thank you." She wondered if he'd accept a hug or flick her away like a bug. Then decided against trying -- she didn't really want him to flick her away like a bug. He stood up straight, leaned forward to take the necklace out of her hands and then put it around her neck. Dawn touched it with her fingertips, hoping her face showed him the appreciation she felt. He had the funniest smile on his face. Maybe something you could put a name on when you were older and had a little more experience.

"Bummer! I'm out of presents."

"Oh hey," Buffy said, "I think there's supposed to be a package for us at the post office from Dad. I bet you have one more present in there to open. Not that you're, you know, greedy or anything."

"Hey, I'm sixteen. If I don't get to be greedy now, then when?"

Everyone smiled at her, which was the correct response, of course. Willow and Tara said it was time to hit the dance floor before they had to eat any more pink cake. Spike looked at Buffy and held out his hand. "Time for a dance?" he asked. Buffy looked at Dawn, who just waved her forward in exasperation. Sometimes it was hard to believe Buffy was so dumb about guys, especially the guys who were in love with her. Geez.

"Son of a..." Xander hissed. Anya gripped his hand tightly.

"What's the prob?" Dawn asked, looking from Xander to Giles and then back to Anya.

"He's very out of sorts that Spike is using his heroic status to worm his way into your affections. Yours and Buffy's, I mean," Anya said, voice grating with her annoyance. "He's been going on about it for weeks now. It's very tiresome. He and Giles are both tiresome. If you ask me."

Dawn looked up at Giles, who straightened and turned a little red in the face. "I... I have concerns. He's still a vampire, regardless of what he's done for you and Buffy."

"Well, it's my party, and I'll like who I want to," Dawn said, frowning at them. Okay, so it wasn't every girl who wanted a guy she was swoony about to be with her sister. There were plenty of cute guys in school to have real crushes on, and how she felt about Spike was different from how she felt about them. The things she liked most about Spike were the things she wanted Buffy to like about him. Buffy should have someone, should just stop being lonely and sad and worried and afraid. It made her bitchy and then you just wanted to hit her. Which, of course, you couldn't, because she could hit you back and kill you with her little finger. So Spike wasn't going to be able to give her great things, a house and car and a dog and two point five kids. For now he could make her happy if she'd just stop with the Helen Keller routine. It gave Dawn the warm fuzzies to see them dancing. Behind her Xander was still muttering about how of course Spike picks the sexy slow song to dance with Buffy, and Dawn grinned at his jealousy.

Buffy felt self-conscious knowing all her friends were watching them, even Willow and Tara, who were dancing nearby casting surreptitious glances. Spike's hand was on her hip, fingers twined through hers, holding on tightly. His cheek against her hair. She could smell something on him under the smoke and leather, something sweet and spicy. They swayed slowly to the beat, barely moving, and she put her hand on his hip, lightly, afraid to touch him. The leather felt warm and she realized he must have eaten.

Right now she couldn't look up at his face, but Buffy said into his chest, "Where were you this past week? I came by, but you were gone."

His low voice tickled her skin, making her quiver as he spoke. "Went to see a fella about getting this chip decommissioned."

Buffy froze.

That was good, he thought. Just what he wanted. Eventually she looked up at him and the fear in her eyes was delicious, sending a little tingle down his spine. Then she pulled her hand away from his and stepped back.

"Ah, ah. Here now, don't do that." He took her hand again and pulled her even closer to him. The fear was aromatic; he breathed it in as deeply as he could. "I'm not going to do it right now, anyway, don't have the dosh for this particular bloke and there's rituals for weeks. So don't get your knickers in a twist, all right?"

"Who..." She was a butterfly pinned, still fluttering.

"A shaman down in Mexico. Only I'm not telling you where, lest you decide to run down there and make hash of him." He twisted her around slowly and put both his arms alongside hers, palms under her elbows. Her tight, round ass moved gently against his dick. "And don't be telling the Scoobies, either."

Buffy turned her face slightly towards his and said so quietly he could hardly hear, "Then why tell me? Why not just do it and come back and kill everyone? You want me to be afraid of you again."

He laughed, a sexy, throaty laugh that, combined with the closeness and movement of their bodies, made the fire in Buffy's lower belly race through her body.

"Don't pretend you don't get it." He pulled her closer, as if they were lovers, and Buffy wondered what everyone else must be thinking of her right now. "You know I love you. But you think the only reason is because of this bloody chip. Want to show you I really have changed. That this is my choice. And the only way to convince you is if it's not working anymore."

She started to tell him that she could never care for him, chip or no chip, but kept her mouth shut. Because she wasn't so certain anymore. He had nothing now, absolutely nothing. And still he stuck by her without any hope of a different future. His tiny gestures of caring left her confused and heartsick, because even her friends didn't see into her or Dawn the way he did. They always waited for Buffy to tell them what to do, for her to come right out and ask for caring and support, but Spike never did. He just marched in and stood by her side, loving her apparently unconditionally.

"I can't be what you want me to be, Spike."

Taking her by the shoulders, he turned her around and pressed his forehead to hers. She was terrified he would kiss her in front of everyone, but he didn't, just closed his eyes and said, "You already are."

There are moments when feeling is crystallized, made real and hard from something intangible and unspoken. When living becomes memory, and now becomes forever, able to be conjured up again and again in its entirety, perfectly formed.

Buffy knew that this was the moment when something in her changed, that she would forever be able to call back this place, these sensations, and know what had happened to her here. She looked up at Spike, absorbing the sensations so that later, when they had again moved beyond this place to somewhere else, she would recall him here with her, radiant and true.

The song had ended without her noticing and he took her hand, leading her back to the others. He didn't sit with them. Instead he went and picked up a pool cue, throwing a quick glance to the floor where Xander was now spastically dancing with both Dawn and Anya. Buffy resolutely did not look at Giles. He would be scowling his disapproving librarian's glare. It turned her stomach into a hard knot, this feeling that she couldn't talk with Giles, the most important person in her life. Buffy needed him to know about this, to have him understand how lonely and fearful she was and how much Spike eased the ache. For every ounce of hatred she'd felt for Spike, Giles and Xander felt double. Buffy did not know how to overcome that.

From across the room Spike watched Buffy, noting how tensely she sat and how disinterestedly she listened to Giles talk. She would take a lot heat from everyone for letting him touch her like that. There was something youthful and free about her tonight, something missing the rest of the time he was with her. She wore a tight, filmy pink blouse and a long denim skirt with embroidered flowers. He remembered those styles from their last fashion go-round in the seventies. With her long hair and pale makeup she appeared as if she could almost have slipped back in time. He knocked the few remaining balls of someone else's game into the pockets, then collected and racked them all. As he paused to light a cigarette, Xander stepped into his field of vision and picked up a cue stick.

"You wanna break, or should I?" Xander asked.

Spike blew out a stream of smoke in Xander's direction, fighting the urge to bark piss off. "Who invited you to play?"

"I did."

Spreading his hands out magnanimously, Spike said, "Be my guest."

Xander broke badly. Spike called the three in the corner pocket. He knocked down four in a row before missing a shot. When he looked up, Xander stood glowering at him.

Before taking his shot, Xander said, "You're really sickening, you know that, don't you?" He pointed with the cue. "Sixteen in the side."

"You don't say, mate." Taking a drink of his beer, Spike glanced at Xander in boredom. He knew what this song and dance were going to be about.

"You're totally yanking Buffy and Dawn's chains. Being all smooth operator with the slow dancing and the giving of perfect presents and constantly reminding them you saved their lives."

Spike grinned at him but said nothing, waiting for Xander to miss his shot, which he did. He chalked his cue and leaned forward, sparing a quick glance at Buffy, who was animatedly talking to Dawn, laughing and giggling like they were two best friends. God, it was good to see her happy once in a while.

After he knocked a few balls in he looked coolly at Xander, who was clearly itching to give him a dressing down. Silence was the worst thing you could do to a gormless nitwit like Harris.

"Doesn't it even bother you, making an idiot of yourself? She's never going to care about you, and even if she spared you the time it would be to use you as her lap dog."

At times, because of the chip, Xander forgot how intensely scary Spike could be. But he was quickly reminded when Spike laughed at his comment and leaned forward with lightning speed to snarl at him, inches from Xander's face. Xander expected him to go all fang-face, but he held back. Just barely.

"That's the trouble with pillocks like you."

Spike stepped backwards, face impassive, as if he hadn't just had a psychotic break. Maybe Xander really ought to get serious about not taunting the scary undead guy, because who knew how long they'd be safe from him? It wasn't like Spike couldn't kill them indirectly. It would be nothing for him to set a trap, get them to accidentally drive off a steep embankment, or set loose a raging demon looking for fresh meat. He couldn't bite, but he hadn't lost his bite.

Chalking his cue, Spike said introspectively "You think it's such an insult, don't you? Lap dog. Pussy whipped. As if being at the beck and call of an exceptional woman like Buffy or Anya is a sorry thing. An unmanly thing. You taunt men who love women with catcalls and spend all your time puffing yourselves up because no woman controls *you.* Men like you, Finn... you're imbeciles."

"Is there a point to this?" Xander snapped. He didn't know exactly what Spike was getting at, but he knew what was behind it. How the women were all acting toward him lately, how forgiving even Willow had been, though she'd been harmed by Spike so many times before. How far Buffy and Dawn allowed him to go. It was starting to scare him thinking that Spike, an undead, soulless killer, had more of a handle on making women happy then he could ever hope to.

"My point is." Spike took a deep drag, pointed at the eight ball and the corner pocket, slid it home with a resounding crack. "You call other blokes those names because they have women you could never have. The ones who have to be the strong manly men? They couldn't hope to earn a woman like Buffy. Only a lucky man would be chosen as Buffy's lap dog. Only a smart one would be happy with that."

"And let me guess. You're a smart man. Never mind that you're a dead and evil one as well."

"Now, see," Spike said conversationally, racking up the balls, "I notice it's never you who's had the chance to be that close to her. To kiss her." He crushed out his cigarette butt and blew the last of the smoke in Xander's face. "No. There you go. You think it's about a woman getting you in the palm of her hand. *I* think it's about getting her in your arms. Who's happier?"

"You've kissed her?" Xander was embarrassed that his voice cracked.

"Oh, look at you, getting all fired up." The crack of the cue ball hitting the other balls made Xander jump. This was turning out to be a miserable party. "Jealous much?"

"Of you?" Xander scoffed.

Touching the cue to Xander's chest a couple times, Spike laughed low in his throat. "You're worried I'm rogering her, when that was your dream for -- how long was it? Remind me now... five years? Only first there was Angel, then GI Joe... now the worst of all."

He liked this, tormenting Harris. Spike was having an awfully jolly time. It reminded him of a night in a lovely dive in the Bowery he'd played pool in. When his opponent had called him a cheater, Spike had driven the cue right through the bloke's eye. Dru, who'd been as out of place in the bar as a spray of lilies, had gleefully clapped her hands and commented, as the fellow writhed and twitched on the floor in death spasms, "It's like a puppet show with strings and such!" Of course the other patrons took offense at that and they'd had to kill every one of them in a spree, one man twigging to what they were quickly enough to nearly stake Spike. That was the first time Spike had realized that perhaps his darling's madness was making her a dangerous companion who could land him in trouble a bit more easily than he necessarily wanted; it hadn't been long after that when things went pear-shaped in Prague and it nearly cost both of them their lives. Or unlives.

"I'm through playing," Xander snapped.

"Oh, now, come on. We're just being lads, aren't we?" He tried not to laugh but it was just so much fun.

Xander stared. Spike could feel the rage washing off him, waves of jealous anger that broke against the past around them, carrying years of dead wood along on its tide.

Tapping the cue stick against Spike's chest, he said, "It's all just fun and games until someone loses a head."

"Or a girlfriend." Spike nodded his head in the other direction and there was Anya, glancing worriedly back and forth between them.

"Have I interrupted a game of Quien es Mas Macho?" Anya asked, her voice strained.

Putting his arm around her, Xander said, "Yeah. Just having a dick size contest, same as all men do every day."

Under his breath, Spike laughed, "You know you'd lose." Xander steered her away, and Spike watched them for a moment, bemused. Somehow, even with all her failings as a human, Anya had got past Harris's prejudices against demons. What she saw in him was a complete bafflement to Spike, but it fascinated him that Xander had been willing to take her on despite knowing what she was. Willow had had her werewolf for a while. Most of them were willing to make allowances for the vagaries of their lovers, yet somehow no one was willing to afford that luxury to Spike, least of all Buffy.

Spike played a few rounds of pool with Willow and Tara, taught Dawn some tricks with a cue and danced some more with her. Eventually Giles left them, and as it got later, Dawn grew tired. Buffy and the rest of them wanted to stay and enjoy this rare pleasure of being out together, unthreatened on a night of the average and unextraordinary.

"I can walk Dawn home," Spike offered. "You lot have a nice night to yourselves." Buffy looked at him with her soft eyes, head tilted. Sounding depths, searching for something inside him.

"All right. We'll be home soon, so you don't necessarily have to stay for her."

He nodded and escorted Dawn out, carrying her acquisitions for the night.

Buffy watched him slip into the shadows past the stairway. Years ago the idea of him being alone with one of her family or friends terrified her. The poles had shifted; now her world took different order and shape, much of it centered around him.

Eventually she broke off from the rest of them to go home. Her body felt sweetly tense, blood building inside her, like arousal. Fiercely wanting to see him, hoping he would be there. The noises of the summer night -- people walking dogs, cars passing by with radios playing, televisions filtered from living room windows -- were shut out by the muffled pulsing of blood in her head.

As Buffy opened the door to her house she saw only the hall light on. The TV was low, its soft glow illuminating only a small corner of the room. Spike was slouched down on the couch absently flicking his lighter top up and down, its soft clink like silverware on china.

After closing the door she came to stand before him and he straightened, turning his head to the side and questioning her with his fathomless eyes, the set of his mouth. Buffy could feel the change inside her taking shape in the heat of wanting and red, red blood blazing through her. The sensation she'd had at the Bronze, the weight of knowing like ripe solid fruit in her hand, the feeling consuming her body and mind.

"If you change just because you love someone, isn't that not really changing? Isn't it selfish, because the only reason you're changing is so the other person will love you back?" Her voice was a rasping whisper. "If you're only motivated by wanting someone else, it's not real change, it's not really love, is it?"

Spike stood, swallowing. He was staggered by her opening herself before him. Like cutting a vein and offering it up. "Bollocks. Armies have gone to war for love. Poetry and novels and great paintings were created because someone loved, and wanted to be loved in return. People kill for it. Love's plenty motivation."

Even in the darkness he could see the spark in her eyes, that constellation swirling inside them, pulling him a thousand light years further. Buffy took his hand and placed it on her heart. It rested almost on her breast, the full softness like a cloud held in his palm, her hands on top of his. Moving closer to her, he tried to form words but they hung lifeless behind his lips. That pounding in his chest must be his absent heart.

"I need you," she whispered hotly and drew herself close to kiss him. He pulled away, confused.

"Why? Because I scared you? Is that all you wanted all this time?" Frustration grew in his voice and face. The need to spend his anger and let the demon take him was overpowering.

"I saw you tonight. What you can be. And I saw what I really wanted."

"And you still hate what you see, is that it? But you want that walk on the wild side?"

"No! I... I don't love you, but I do have feelings--"

Abruptly he stopped Buffy, pushing her away with the flat of his hand. "Don't do me any favors, luv."

Spike slipped out the door quickly, leaving her stunned. After a moment she collected herself and went into the kitchen for water, gulping it down, still feeling hot. She'd thought he would want that. Confession and desire. All this time that had been what he pushed for. She was supposed to be a tactician. What were the tactics to use with him, then, if this wasn't right? She didn't understand what to do to make it right.

Buffy did not undress for bed; instead waited in her room until Willow and Tara came home. She listened tensely to them move throughout the house, patience warring with passion. After she heard them finally get into bed, she slipped out of the house quietly and went straight to Spike's. The moon was bright and low in the sky as she walked through Sunnydale, diamond-dust stars sparkling overhead. For once she carried no weapons; hands at her sides, open and waiting for something else to fill them.

The candles inside his crypt cast an amber glow all about. Spike was sitting on the stone bench by the window reading a worn paperback book, a glass of vodka in his hand. He didn't look up at her when she entered.

"Come to torment me some more?" he asked, turning a page.

The furnace inside her made her sweaty and clammy, and Buffy clenched her fists over and over, breathing deeply. "I don't always know what to believe. About myself. About who I am. I have these dreams," Buffy said quietly, and he finally looked up at her, his eyes tender at last. He had such expressive eyes; that was the first thing she'd ever noticed about him once they stopped being enemies. "Of that night. I think... I was supposed to die. But you saved me and I don't know what it means."

Putting the book and glass down, Spike stood and came towards her. "That's what's troubling you, Slayer? That bloody night?"

"When I'm with you, I feel like it's all right. The rest of the time, I don't know what to think or do. I need you, Spike."

He dropped to his knees before her and laid his cheek against her thighs. Tentatively Buffy touched his hair, her palm behind his head. His submission was an invitation to unburden herself. "The first slayer. She came to me in a vision and said that I should forgive. Love, give, forgive. When Mom died, I didn't think there was anyone I could give to or forgive anymore. That I had nothing left. But I realized tonight... it was you." Buffy couldn't look down at his face. If he rejected this or mocked her, the fire that kept her alive would die not just for now, but forever. He held her, motionless, not speaking.

She spied the book he'd been reading on the bench. Something so everyday was somehow comforting to see in his space. Facets she'd ignored until now finally glimmering before her. Opening her eyes. "Why does your book have a cat with a cigarette and a gun on the cover?"

The rich, muffled laugh he made was sweet against her legs as she let him draw her tight. "It's Russian satire. It would make sense if you read it." He sat back on his heels, his hands on her hips, and turned his face up to her.

"It sounds kinky," she said and looked down into his eyes. The corners crinkled with his smile, map lines of a happiness he hadn't shown her before.

"Not nearly enough." He stood and offered her his vodka.

She drank some of it, but it was horrid and she shivered, making little noises of disgust.

"Sorry, nothing else for you. I didn't expect..." He motioned to the chair. "Here, sit." But Buffy pushed him instead, knocking him backwards into the armchair.

Standing above him, she took off her jacket and asked, "Did you ever go there? To Russia?"

Bewildered, Spike looked up at her, the candlelight-pale skin of her arms and neck and face glowing above him, her golden hair a lustrous cascade. "Yes. At about the time that book was written. But it was too bleak. Didn't like it much." Buffy slid down onto his lap, her legs on either side of his. The skirt hiked up over her creamy skin as he slid his hands along her thighs to cup the perfect globe of her bottom, while she leaned forward to kiss him, her breasts pressed lightly against his body.

Ohchristohjesus. The girl wasn't wearing any knickers. That implied a level of planning he wasn't prepared for. His hands ranged up along her ass, over her hips, where he teased his thumbs down to the silky hair, the space where thigh met torso. He felt himself outside of time and space, as if gravity had disappeared and he was now lighter than the world around him, each motion letting him fall weightless and floating over and over.

They moved against each other, hands, lips, limbs. White blades of moonlight shone on the far wall, the beam sliced evenly by the window bars, casting opal light on them both. No sound penetrated the room, not even the summer insects buzzing, only Buffy's sharp breaths and the soft kiss of skin against skin, wetness on wetness.

"Downstairs. The bed," Spike croaked, and lifted her up still wrapped around him. They clambered down the ladder and Spike pulled the covers away. Clothes disappeared. Tangling in desire, they tasted and felt and learned each other, time stretching away like the horizon, hour or minutes, neither knew. Revealing everything. Spike was an explorer finding things undiscovered in her, new places her other lovers hadn't seen and that only he could claim. A treasure opened after years in the dark. His mouth on the smooth wet folds of her pussy, soft as petals, secret. Buffy arched above, ebbing and flowing in the tide of her pleasure, her gasps and flexions heating him to new life.

When he entered her he kissed her and she could taste herself on his hungry mouth. Buffy's hands were everywhere, trying to gain more purchase against his skin, the sculpted muscles. Spike's cock was larger than she'd expected. He filled her with his hardness as he thrust deeply, anchoring himself inside her. Then she used her strong legs to flip him over, riding above him, controlling him. Joined by muscle and blood and skin and fluid. Her mouth on his nipples and her fingers teasing his testicles drove him mad. She watched him as he stared at her, baffled and grateful, waiting to see the moment he finally let that sweet madness take him completely. He came hard, silently, his fingers caressing her breasts as she stretched above him, his eyes filled with a mystery only love could create.

Buffy bent to kiss him as he was free-falling, a bird shot down in flight, his center spiraling down and down. Her hands moved softly on either side of Spike's face, wiping away the traces of her sweat, smoothing his skin. The softness of her mouth a benediction at last for his erstwhile soul. "Love. Give. Forgive," she said against his lips, and sunlight caressed his body.

 

 

Through the remaining night they flowed together again and again. Spike had once thought in his indulgent fantasies that if he was lucky he might make love to her once before she left him, never to return. But her hunger matched his. He was tender and rough as Buffy needed it; she knew at times to give him the luxury of pain. The chip remained silent, its sensors seemingly astute enough to know the difference between the violence of passion and intent to harm. Soft words had filled the underground cave like the flickering candle flames: I never thought. There. I don't want to hurt. Yes. Her voice called to him across centuries, making him whole again.

Once, they lay together, talking as if they were old friends rather than new ones formed from old enmities. His hand moved gently up and down the curves of her body lying sideways before him.

"You've started school?" he asked. Her eyes were closed in dreamy half-sleep.

"Yeah."

"How is it?"

"It's nice to be back. Around normal kids, kids who don't have to save the world."

He laughed softly. "My little coed."

Guilelessly she said, "I'll never be your anything." He felt her stiffen in fear of having let it slip.

He kissed her parted lips. "We'll see."

Buffy relaxed then, knowing he wasn't hurt. It would take a long time to reorder her thinking, to move out of the pattern of seeing him with jaundiced eyes or not seeing him at all. Sliding her leg along his thigh she reached for his hand to guide his fingers between her legs, and then gripped his cock, her thumb teasing the head and foreskin. It took nothing at all, just a whisper of a touch, for her to be wet for him, and he would get hard again from just a look, willing. Vampire stamina was something, she would credit him that.

Each time afterward they lay spent and she told herself it was time to go. If Buffy arrived home after everyone else was up, the questions and the resentment would be too much to bear. But it had been so long since she had felt this safe and satisfied, too long since she wasn't lonely and empty inside.

After a drowsy sleep, she woke to see Spike standing by the bar pouring a drink. When he heard her move he turned around and walked back to the bed. She admired the way his muscles rippled and turned, how precisely he moved, the way his soft cock shifted back and forth. The way he was comfortable in his nakedness, so easy and proud. How incredible to be here like this, to like him like this. As he sipped his drink he sat down beside her, then pushed her flat on her back. Turning the glass, he dribbled some whiskey on her chest and stomach. She giggled as the cool liquid touched her skin. Spike climbed above her and licked each drop off slowly.

"I really ought to go," Buffy said quietly, letting him trace patterns on her skin with his tongue and lips. His face above her was pale and shadowed like the edge of the moon. Soon his mouth hovered just above her pubic bone as she lifted her hips in anticipation.

"I know. I'll take you home in a bit." Hands cupped her breasts and his mouth traced more patterns between her legs, the softhard button of flesh under his tongue like sweet fruit. How could he let her leave, ever again?

His tongue was like velvet against her clit, knowing the right pressure, the right speed. He was magic. She came so fast that he sat up after a moment, blinking at her, wearing that befuddled look again. Pulling him to her, she said, "Yes. It's you. What you know how to do to me."

He'd cast his shadow on her now, left it as a body leaves an imprint on a bed after it's gone. No matter what happened in the future, a part of her was his to keep.

"You were talking in your sleep before," Spike said against her neck.

"What did I say? Please don't tell me I was talking about the boys from 'N Sync."

There was a soft chuckle and then he looked into her eyes. "Slayer, what aren't you telling me?" Spike was afraid she would see his concern as smothering, but it was hard to hold back on anything he felt. Now that she was here, now that she was letting him near her.

"Huh?"

"The bad dreams. This fight thing. You were talking about dying."

"What I told you before. I think something else was supposed to happen, only it didn't and I'm waiting... I wouldn't have the dreams if there wasn't going to be something else, right? It's a warning."

Spike shook his head. "It doesn't work that way. Buffy. You scared me, the way you were talking. That death was a gift."

"Don't. Don't be scared," she told him, and enveloped him in her arms, her legs. "We don't have enough time for that."

We are veiled, he knew. Separated by flesh, alone and wholly contained within ourselves. It's only this time when we can come together, transcend the walls of flesh and bone, be one.

"I can't help you if you don't let me," Spike said, and they both smiled, struck simultaneously by the cant of their world, tilted off center now.

"I'm fine," Buffy whispered. He knew she was not.


	3. Transilience

In time you'll see that some things  
Travel faster than light  
In time you'll recognize that love is larger than life

_\--Neil Finn, Faster than Light_

 

Because Buffy had lost track of time with Spike it was late when she got home; everyone was already up. Willow and Tara were upstairs, the shower running. Dawn was in the kitchen and looked at her blankly when she came in. She'd been reading the paper and shoveling down the last of the pancakes. Tara made them, Buffy could tell -- she always made the funny shapes.

"Hey," was all Buffy could think to say. A long, bumpy road stretched out in front of her.

"Hey, yourself," Dawn said, but Buffy couldn't tell if it was petulant or just resigned. Dawn looked her up and down, casting a cold eye over the clothes she'd worn the night before.

"If I tried to talk to you about it, would you even let me? I can't imagine what you must be thinking of me." She motioned to the back porch and Dawn followed her out, head ducked low, a crease in her forehead and her mouth drawn tight. They sat on the chairs in the yard and Buffy sighed, scanning the trees and the painfully bright blue sky, wishing she could be anywhere else right now.

"So, you guys probably were talking about where I was when you made breakfast." She glanced at Dawn, her mouth twisting at the corners. "I was with Spike. I didn't mean to stay out all night. It just kind of happened."

"Duh."

"You're angry with me, and I get that. But are you angrier because I'm a skanky ho of a bad sister or because it was Spike?"

Chipping and biting at her fingernail polish, Dawn didn't say anything for a while, just breathed in and out. "I don't think you're a ho."

"But you think I'm a bad sister?"

"No." Chip. Chip. Bite. "I wanted you and Spike to get together. The way I feel about him..." She finally looked at Buffy, a face soft and young, a true kid sister, the way Buffy most wanted her to be. "It's not the way I feel about other guys at school and stuff. He's just... I like him because he's older and he's cool and he says mean things about people in that sarcastic English way. And he's a total hottie. But it's not a for-real kind of liking."

"Then you're pissed at me because?" Buffy asked, raising her eyebrows, completely confused.

"I'm not pissed at you!" Dawn shouted a little too earnestly. She lowered her voice, talking between her teeth. "I'm not pissed off. I just... Spike is so into you. And if you're into him now..."

Buffy spread her hands wide. "Whoa, nelly! Hold all five hundred of your horses there. That's not in the yet, yet."

"Oh, please. You're completely into him now, even a blind man could see it. You guys were dancing in a total 'get a room' way or something at the Bronze, and you were so... miss hootchie mama with the booty contact there. In case you didn't notice."

Scowling at her, Buffy remained silent.

Bite. Chip. "But it just made me wonder. I liked thinking that he kinda liked me on my own. That he didn't think I was just your bratty kid sister. If you're sleeping with him, then he finally got what he wanted. He got you. And is that the only reason he helped me? Did he save me just because he'd get you?"

Her heart felt weighted, pulling her down, down to the bottom of the sea. "No! God, no, Dawn. He did it because he cared about you."

But Dawn wasn't so sure that Buffy could see anything outside the little box of where she'd kept her picture of Spike all these years. "I guess."

Sometimes Buffy was just such an idiot, you could see why she couldn't keep a boyfriend. Guys would put their feelings for her right out in her face, their worship for her, and she'd just walk along, la de da, completely missing the whole thing. And the stupidest thing about it was that Buffy deserved more than she got, and you had to wonder about someone who missed seeing even the crappy low-rent love when she deserved to get the deluxe version.

It had been such a long time since Buffy had touched her, really touched her, so it was wonderful when she reached out and gently smoothed Dawn's hair. Dawn leaned into the caress, remembering their mother and the way it used to feel to know you were loved and safe.

"Dawnie. I don't always get what's happened with Spike. The Spike I knew for years, the one we all knew, was evil and horrible. He took pleasure not just in killing people, but in terrorizing them and being sadistic. He didn't kill to feed, he did it for fun. You didn't know him then; those memories weren't given to you."

"I know. You all hate him. Or at least, you used to."

"It was more than that. God, it's so complicated." Buffy rubbed her hands across her face. "He tried to kill me, to kill Willow, he nearly did kill Xander... and he doesn't have a soul, so right and wrong... they're not easy concepts for him. I think lately he's tried really hard to do the right things because he feels for me and for you. He liked Mom a lot, too. But it's something he has to do very consciously, very deliberately, or else he'd slip into the thing -- the person -- we knew before. He can't bite anyone, but that doesn't mean he couldn't still kill them, do you see what I'm saying?"

"Yeah. I get that, I do. It's just... if you guys broke up, wouldn't he... hate me? Kill me because he was mad at you?"

It almost made Buffy laugh to think of it terms of breaking up and being a couple and being into each other. But there was some truth to it all if you looked at it from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old. She remembered a time when it was all about hearts and flowers and true love. Before Angel turned bad, before the world crashed in around her... before she'd died.

"No, I don't think he would," Buffy said. "Everything he does now he's doing for his own reasons. It wasn't his choice to be stuck here or to have feelings for me, but it was his choice to help us."

"Are you going to keep seeing him, or was last night a one-nighter?"

Buffy wondered if she'd been this grown up when she was sixteen, or if the kind of company Dawn was surrounded by made her say all these wild things.

"I don't know. I guess I will. There's so much baggage to deal with about everyone and him." And a prophecy, and a feeling like I don't belong here, and the constant sound of death in my ears every time I fall asleep. "Plus, I have to be really careful, we have to be really careful. I'm your guardian now and having guys over, even if no one knows they're bloodsucking fiends, or me staying out all night with *any* one, is going to get noticed, and it could be serious trouble for us. I don't know what to do about that right now."

"Is Giles going to freak?"

"Big time. Imagine having to explain me to the council."

Dawn put on an English accent, a very bad English accent, and said, "Yes, she's a very headstrong girl, and there's this unseemly attraction to vampires, but she has saved the world a few times we must remember."

"Pretty much, yup."

"Spike never was like other vamps, though, was he? I mean, he does some kinda weird things, and sometimes he's so much like all the guys at school that you just have to roll your eyes and go, whatever. He's not like Angel, but he's still not like other vamps."

Buffy thought of how he felt between her legs, the way he thrust into her like he belonged inside her body, how his eyes never left hers even when he climaxed.

Here, kitty, kitty. His voice in her mother's kitchen. Official sponsor of my killing you. Fangs heading for her throat, yellow eyes pinpointed at her neck. Love's not brains, children, it's blood. I'm all you've got. "No, he wasn't like other vampires." One good day.

She reached over and took Dawn's key necklace between her fingers, turning it this way and that. "I guess I didn't want to know it before, but he wasn't."

 

 

Buffy woke that night to find herself in her sleep clothes, standing somewhere down Revello Drive in the dewy grass of someone's lawn. How the hell had she gotten here?

She looked down at her bare feet covered in freshly mowed clippings. The address was... three whole blocks from her house. Crap. She scanned the area, uncertain, wondering if someone had kidnapped her in her sleep and brought her here for some kind of hazing ritual or other nefarious purposes, and began tentatively walking back home.

This would be just perfect if she was discovered wandering around weaponless in her jammies by a pack of vampires. What an entry in the Watcher journals Giles would get to make.

From behind her Buffy heard a sound and whirled, fists up, to find Spike standing there, palms held forward.

"Only me, Slayer. What the bleeding hell are you doing out here like this?"

"Spike. I... I don't know. I woke up here. I went to bed and then I woke up here." She scowled at him. "What are *you* doing out here?"

"Came to check up on you. Reckoned you wouldn't be back... it would take you awhile to sort it all out and do the 'I'll never let him touch me again thing,' and just thought I'd peek in on you. Make sure you were safe."

Spreading her hands out, Buffy shrugged in a gesture of "Well, as you can see" and started walking again. Then she stopped and looked at him. "Wait. You were going to peep through my window or something? Is that what you're always doing down on the front lawn? Watching me?"

He squinted down the block. "Yeah, well, you caught me. I'm stalking you." Under loud protestations, he scooped her up and began carrying her home. He should feel embarrassed at being caught out, but his fear for her sanity pierced him to his rotten core. "It's maybe a damn good thing since you're wandering about defenseless. Don't you know that big S on your chest is like a neon light luring all the bugs to you? And I wasn't peeping. Peeking in on you. It's not the same thing."

If a copper happened by they were done for. Dru had taught him a lot of those cheap Gypsy tricks to put the whammy on people, but he'd never been all that good at it. Took too long to hypnotize people, and he preferred to snap necks instead. Spike hurried back to her house and slipped in as quietly as he could, dropping her gently to stand. But Buffy didn't take her arms from around his neck. "Come upstairs."

Drawing his head back, Spike looked at her in bewilderment. "It's one thing for you to stay with me," he whispered sharply, "but it's another thing for me to stay here with you."

Speaking softly into his neck, Buffy mumbled, "I'm scared to sleep. I can sleep if you stay."

All right, so he'd dreamt this a hundred times, but with his recent practice in Doing the Right Thing, he shouldn't even be tempted to stay. Spike took off his coat to set it on a chair. He picked Buffy up and carried her silently upstairs, setting her gently on her bed.

All the times he'd been in her room it had never been with her to stay. It still looked so girlish. The side of her that never had the chance to really come out, the side he wanted to see sparkle. If he could do nothing else for her he wanted her to have the chance to be girlish once in a while, to feel free enough to be the young woman she was. He moved silently into the bathroom and returned with a towel, tenderly wiping off the dew and grass that covered her feet. Obviously she was freezing even on this summer night, her body trembling against an arctic wind that came from someplace inside. Spike lay beside her on the bed stroking her golden hair, offering her his feeble warmth. She looked so haggard, with dark circles under her eyes. And she seemed thinner, though he didn't think that was possible. Of course she was still impossibly lovely to him.

"Pet, what's going on? This isn't normal for you, is it, the talking and walking in your sleep? You ever done this before?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. Not that many people could tell me if I did."

That made him laugh. "Well, something's bothering you. Any idiot, even me, could see that. I want to help you, but I can't if you won't tell me. What are you seeing?"

Before she'd wakened on the street, Buffy had seen herself jumping off the tower, sheet lightning and rolling smoke surrounding her. How did she explain to Spike, or to anyone, that she was sure it had happened, that it hadn't felt like a nightmare but as real to her as this right now?

"I can't." She buried herself in him and pulled the covers up higher despite the heat of the night. He was so solid and strong beside her. No, Buffy thought, I don't love him, but boy am I in like right now. "Talk to me."

Almost no one had wanted him to talk, ever. Even in life, most people he knew had wanted him to shut up; in death Angel and Darla had hated listening to him. Dru had listened from her own strange planet, but even she'd disappeared for long stretches, as though she had to be away from him to find pieces of herself, hear only herself inside her head. Since he'd been stuck here in Sunnydale he'd listened to the words "shut up" ceaselessly.

"What about?" he asked in mild astonishment.

"Anything," she whispered. "What was your life like? Before, I mean."

"Oh God, you wouldn't want to hear about that, believe me. Pathetic doesn't even begin to do it justice." Her grip tightened on his waist, though, so he told her of his world then. About ladies with fans and fainting couches, about gaslit streets and the sound of horses clip-clopping along cobblestones, and the smell of coal-filled air. About a time when he knew what morning really was.

After awhile he felt her relax into sleep. He sat up, holding her tiny hand, its web of blue veins twitching with blood under the translucent skin, and watched as she slept her restless sleep.

 

 

For some reason Willow woke early, as if something was asking her to be up and ready for it. Maybe it was just the fragment of a dream, she decided, listening to the birds outside the window. Next to her Tara lay peacefully still under sleep, so Willow got quietly out of bed, wrapped a robe around herself, and went downstairs to start breakfast.

She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw Spike's coat on the chair in the dining room. Everyone in the household had had the Big Talk with Buffy yesterday, first Dawn and then later Willow and Tara, about what had changed with Spike and how Buffy didn't know where it was going but that it wouldn't go anywhere if people were uncomfortable. Buffy had stressed that it was important to look like a good guardian for Dawn. Now Willow was a little nonplussed by having Spike spend the night so obviously and so soon. Although thankfully they hadn't made any noises last night and as far as she could tell, no one in the house had known.

As she was contemplating this, a voice said softly, "Red."

"Aigh!" she shouted, and did a little bunny hop. Not only could you not see vampires sometimes, you couldn't even hear them coming. It was incredibly unfair -- they were powerful, silent, nearly invisible, plus they could put the whammy on you with almost no effort. It all seemed like an incredible inequity.

Spike put a hand up. "No fear."

Easy for him to say, Willow thought. "I didn't hear you. I... you were here last night?"

Nodding his head in the direction of the kitchen, he asked, "Can I talk to you?"

"Okayyy," she said warily. Something about him scaring her like that reminded her too much of past encounters. Willow followed him into the kitchen. He took a beer from the refrigerator and started drinking. Willow cringed at the early hour before she remembered that this was the end of his day, really.

"Wasn't planning on being here and we didn't do anything, if that's what's got you worried."

"Well, then, why are you here? Are you, like, being a peeping Tom or something?"

He rolled his eyes and made frustrated hand gestures. "Why does everyone think I'm peeping and stalking?"

"I don't know," she answered brightly. "Because you stole her sweaters and made a shrine and used to hang outside like obsesso-boy? Oh! and you built a robot so you could have pretend sex with her?"

He took a long pull on the beer. "Okay, you got me there," he said and stared at Willow glumly. "Look. I know I'm not top of the pops round here. But there's something wrong with Buffy. And it's getting worse every day. Last night I ended up here because I found her sleepwalking. She was about three blocks down and not wearing a stitch except those cute little bottoms and that tiny top."

His mind wandered as he said that, remembering what it had been like to see her body slowly revealed to him. The matchless beauty of it. The wonder of looking down to see her head in his hands, her mouth around his cock. Spike closed his eyes. It didn't do to get so distracted.

"She was sleepwalking?" Willow's eyes were huge with alarm.

"Has she ever done that before? Talked in her sleep, especially about how she's supposed to die?"

"Well... I don't know, Spike. Most of us, we never spend the night with her." She touched her hand to her face, staring down at the counter. "I guess it's a good thing after all that you've had the chance to have... found that out."

"Don't know. What I do want to know is -- can you and Tara do some kind of spell? Get inside her head? Because she won't tell me what it is and she's clearly not telling you either. I don't know if..." he trailed off, rubbing his hands over his face. How did he say this so they wouldn't try to step in and prevent him from being with Buffy? "I need to know whether this thing, this vision she thinks was about her, is what's causing this. Or if it's me."

Willow pulled her head back, stunned. She'd never given him credit for being able to figure things like that out even though she'd seen time and again how perspicacious he was about people. She put a hand on his arm. It was the first time she had ever touched him willingly. "I don't know if you know this, but Tara can see people's auras. It's just a gift she has. And she's been warning us that Buffy's has been darker and darker lately. We didn't know if it was losing her mom and all that, or something else. At least we know there's something else now."

"But can you find out what's in her head?" he asked, his voice rising in frustration. " I don't want to... to violate her, but it's eating her alive, whatever's causing this. She looks like hell. Well, as much as anyone that beautiful can look like hell."

That made Willow smile. "I don't know. We can see, Tara knows spells like that better than me. You want a ball of light or to teleport something, I rock, but for people's emotions, Tara's your girl." A sharp needle-glance in his direction. "Or, *my* girl. Not yours, no way."

"Hey," Spike said, holding his hands up like a thief caught bang to rights in the cash box, "a man can admire without taking."

"He could also admire without his eyes bugging out of his head like hard-boiled eggs every time he sees her boobs."

"Shows how much you know about men." Spike started pacing back and forth across the kitchen in his long, loping strides. "Look, Will. If I'm the cause, I need to know." His stomach churned, now he was talking about it at last.

"It's so weird to be here talking to you like this. Like you're Joe Normal Guy in love with my best friend. You tried to kill me twice. You terrified me."

He stared at her for awhile, trying to figure out what she was saying. "Oh! Um... sorry, really sorry about that. New man, yadda yadda."

Willow gave him a cute, tight smile and nodded her head. "I figured. Maybe I shouldn't tell you, but I don't think it's because she's involved with you. Tara said that when Buffy is around you, her aura seems quieter and lighter."

He stopped pacing, blinking, something inside him tightened and achey. "Really?" he asked, though he didn't expect an answer. Some things were too wonderful to be questioned. You never knew what the answer would be, so it was best to leave them as they were.

"So, what does my aura look like, or has she ever said?"

"You're dead, Spike. You don't have one."

"Oh, right. Should have figured."

"Spike. You know you're going to have to change your life a little if you want to be with her. Do something better if you want to be in it for the long haul."

"You think I could be in for the long haul?"

"It's up to you. But Buffy, she's not large with the big bad. So you might want to be thinking ahead about the good and all. Now that you're a new man, yadda yadda."

He opened the back door and grinned at her. Then he faded into the early morning twilight.

Upstairs, Buffy woke when she heard the back door closing, and looked around groggily. On the bed next to her was a note in Spike's tiny, precise handwriting.

> "Best to leave before there's a scene. See you tonight.  
>  \--S  
>  You're beautiful when you sleep."

Smiling, Buffy put the piece of paper in the nightstand drawer. She was going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn't mean she was only beautiful when she slept and the rest of the time she looked like hell.

It had been so much more than she could have expected, the way he took care of her last night. How he hadn't asked for anything in return. If he'd initiated sex she would have responded, the embers inside her smoldering quietly, constantly waiting for a spark when he was near. Instead he'd stayed quietly by her side, talking to her, and she'd listened to his accent shift and his voice change a little as he'd told her about things he'd seen throughout the past century. She got out of bed, putting her hand for a moment on the side where he'd lain. But there was no heat there, no trace of his body. Now she was just alone in the day again.

 

 

"All's I'm saying is that right now, Buffy doesn't *know* what's right for her," Xander insisted, looking at the table full of women surrounding him, glaring at him. They'd met at the Magic Box when Willow had called them to detail her conversation with Spike.

At least Giles was on his side, but he was staying over by the counter as if the physical distance removed him from the problem. Xander was flummoxed that they weren't freaking over Buffy sleeping with Spike, slayer of slayers, tormenter of all their lives for years. For the past few months he'd watched how Buffy and Dawn acted around Spike, waiting for the moment when Spike turned their gratitude to his advantage. Now here it was and the girls were just... rah, Spike.

"I don't think that's what's causing her to turn to Spike," Tara said quietly. "I think what pushes her to him is that he loves her and gives her the security she needs right now. Something else is causing her problems."

That was easy for Tara to say. She'd never been on the receiving end of severe head injury from Spike.

"You guys know about post-traumatic stress disorder, right?" Tara asked. "It manifests itself sometimes months and months after a traumatic event. And Buffy's had, like, clusters of them recently."

Willow nodded at Tara. "Tell them about the aura."

"When Buffy's with Spike? Her aura calms a little. But it's been getting darker and darker. And soon it might be too dark for him to help with. So I don't know if we... we should do anything to force her away from him." She shrugged her shoulders up tight towards her head and dipped her chin, looking down at the table.

"As much as I hate to say it," Giles finally spoke up, "I'm forced to agree with Tara. I don't believe Buffy's decline is due to Spike. If we can find a spell that won't be invasive, if we absolutely can't get her to talk... perhaps we can find out what this prophecy or vision is that she thinks is coming for her."

It was terrifying for all of them to watch Buffy spin out of control, wondering how much each of them -- from Giles's impending departure to how they'd handled Joyce's death -- was contributing to her disintegration. And how much was simply the overwhelming responsibilities she'd been encumbered with in recent months of saving the world from a demented god.

"Buffy's been through a great deal. If the one... person she feels safe with is Spike, then our badgering her about it won't help," Giles added.

"Giles, is there anything in the Watcher histories that deals with this? Slayers and vampires getting together?" Willow asked, her eyebrows nearly at her scalp line.

"Nothing at all. In fact, I've long since stopped trying to figure out how to report anything about Buffy to the council. She's unique. It was utterly unprecedented for a vampire to love a slayer, let alone her to love him back. With two vampires... it verges on the farcical."

"No kidding," Xander said bitterly. "Ya think?"

Giles glared at Xander with his most Englishy look.

"Does Dawn know about this?" Anya asked, as always reminding them of the things they forgot to consider.

Willow shook her head. "I don't think Buffy's said anything about her visions, and we sure haven't. And Spike's been really careful."

Xander scowled at her, then turned to scowl more intently at Giles. "I mean, safe and Spike. What's wrong with this picture? Aren't any alarm bells going off in anyone's heads except mine? Any voices going self destruct in T minus five minutes?"

The rising anxiety in the room wasn't helped by knowing Giles was leaving. With the one grounding influence soon out of the picture, they'd be left with the possibility of Buffy carrying on with a vampire who didn't have the tempering influence of a soul. How long that chip would last, no one knew, and she might be unwilling to listen to anyone but Giles.

"I don't think it would have been anyone's choice, Xander," Giles said evenly. "But we're not in control of Buffy's life. Even in the early days, I never was, and I can't imagine you should have developed a misapprehension in that regard, either."

All three of the girls drew their lips tightly together and looked down at the table. Xander was obviously outnumbered.

"But... just... Spike! Of all the vampires in all the towns in all the world, why did she have to pick that one?" His voice was reaching the place where only dogs could hear it. Buffy was having sex with Spike. He was sleeping overnight in her bed. The creepiest creep in creepdom was macking on Buffy like she was his sexbot and she liked it.

Shaking her head, Willow said, "Well, Spike's always had that freakish ability to zero in on what the rest of us were thinking or feeling. Remember when he pushed us apart last year? It's just that, now he's using his powers for good instead of evil, I guess. Oh! Like... like Darth Vader, how at the end he turned to the good side of the Force so he could help Luke."

Tara smiled at Willow and they gazed adoringly at each other.

"I think he's still Darth minus the deathbed conversion," Xander snapped. "He wants into her pants, and he knows Dawn and Buffy want to build a statue in his honor now. He's manipulating them."

"That doesn't give Buffy much credit, does it?" Giles asked dryly.

"If she wasn't so... under the weather lately, do you think he'd be where he is now?" Xander turned to Willow. "I don't get it. When she dumps him, what do you think he's going to do? Don't you remember when Dru dumped him, what he did? He nearly killed you and me, and by extension Cordy almost died, and you lost Oz for a while. How can you think he's not going to get like that again? Because the vampire version of sentimental and depressed? Really scary."

"Thanks for the Judgment at Nuremberg recap, there," Willow responded, tension crackling in her voice. Tara watched Willow anxiously. "I don't know that he'd do the same thing. He knows better now."

"Anyone besides me notice that it's the guys who are anti-Spike, and the girls who are all, oh, let him use Buffy for his own nefarious purposes?"

Xander looked down as Willow's fingers closed around his wrist, very hard, a warning gesture she'd used on him since elementary school. Xander looked at her eyes, fiery with her demands.

"Stop it, Xander," she said quietly. "Buffy is our friend and she's in trouble, and singling Spike out as the cause isn't fair. She's had a lot of pain lately. Her mom, Glory, now Giles." She glanced at Giles, who twitched his head a little and rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "And Spike has done some good things."

Xander stared down at the delicate hand on his wrist. Even Willow was smitten by Spike now. "I didn't understand how a slayer could choose a vampire before, but I understand even less how she could choose another one. And I mean, Spike."

"I kind of like him," Anya said off-handedly.

It appeared that Xander was trying to speak, but no words came out.

"Well, he says what's on his mind, unlike the rest of you, and he can be funny. Plus he's very attractive in a kind of louche, retro way... if you like that sort of thing."

"Is he working some kind of mojo on all the women here? Because this is just -- it's one thing for you to go soft on him and be all, oh, he's mister sexy with the accent and the cheekbones and the adorable overbite, but I just can't believe Buffy can forgive him enough to be sleeping with him." When he shut up, all the women were staring at him again, eyes wide.

Anya had risen and was dusting off stock items, always a sign she was bored and wanted to move on. Other people's problems were not of interest to her. "I can think of worse things," Anya said behind him.

"Worse! Like what?" Xander asked incredulously.

"Like being lonely. Like not being loved when you could be. Like knowing you have a destiny no one else could understand and you're stuck trying to fulfill it on your own while everyone takes and takes from you, but rarely gives."

They all looked at the table, lips pressed together, twitchy as coffee addicts before the first cup. Giles put his hands on the counter and stared into the glass. There wasn't anything anyone could say to the scorching truth of that.

"Okay," was all Xander could get out. The bell above the door jingled and in walked Buffy.

"Okay what?" she asked brightly. They all stared dumbly at her, shifting their mental states from talking about Buffy to talking to Buffy.

"Just... we're talking about Giles. Leaving, about Giles leaving," Willow said, reaching for the save.

"Oh. He... he told you," Buffy said sadly, sitting down on Anya's vacated chair. "Without me."

"Just now," Tara answered, nodding.

"And we were talking about how it would affect your future," Willow explained nervously.

Glancing at each of their faces in turn, Buffy could see the lie written softly on their hopelessly honest features. The way they all looked at her, the harsh, scrutinizing glare from Xander. They were discussing whether she and Spike should see each other -- probably using the same old notes, a tired tune. How he was manipulating her. How evil he was. Blah blah blahdy blah.

"O-okay," she said. "Hey, I have to train, so I'll just..." she got up and went to the back room. Didn't wait for Giles to come and tape her hands or dispense fatherly advice, taking care of herself instead. As she pulled the tape tight, she heard the door close behind her. Turning, ready to lay into Giles for not letting her know he was going to tell them, for talking about Spike, Buffy was confronted by Xander with his mouth pulled down in an angry frown.

"I didn't know you were sleeping with him," he said, his voice tight with jealousy.

"I slept with him one night. And it's not your business, anyway."

"When your evil monster boyfriend kills your friends, then it's their business. Buff. You're my friend. We help each other. We love each other. I don't want to see... he's evil, Buffy. At least Angel had a soul, but Spike has nothing. He's still evil, and he's going to hurt you."

"I think it's more likely that I'd hurt him."

"What could you possibly get out of this? He's... okay, he's got that whole Joe Cool, I'm a rebel and I'll never ever be any good thing going on, and I know girls like that, but is the rest of it worth it just for a guy to play with as your toy?"

"Oh, right, and you and miss greed is good are perfectly normal, is that it? Everything's just average and fine with you two. Sure."

"At least I'm not putting out for a vampire."

"Putting out? Putting OUT?" Buffy made as if to hit him and Xander recoiled, almost afraid she would. But she held her fist at her side, eyes flashing their anger like a freeway warning sign. "I'm not putting out. I'm involved with Spike. And yeah, I understand how strange and unacceptable that is, but you've gone way beyond the line. You have no right to tell me how to live my life."

"Considering that Goth-boy tried to kill me personally, and has tried on a number of occasions to kill my friends, including you, yeah, I think I have a right to butt in."

"No, Xander, you don't. Because that's in the past. So is your well-documented hatred of Angel, even when he was on our side. Spike's on our side now."

"He's only there so he can get into your pants."

"God! Listen to yourself, you sanctimonious prick! Where do you get off telling me I can or can't see him? He saved Dawn's life, he saved all of us. And he saved me most of all because if he hadn't loved me enough to do what he did, I was going to die on that tower. There was a prophecy."

Xander took a deep breath, trying to understand what she was saying. But it didn't matter. "You don't even see what the problems are that must be going on, do you, that you keep sleeping with the very thing you're supposed to kill."

"I don't keep sleeping with anyone. Jesus, Xander. It's all about you, isn't it? Who you can stand. Who you approve of. Did you ever once think about me? That I'm lonely as hell? You and Anya get to be together and get married and have babies. I won't ever get to do that. Not only do I have an early pull date stamped on my forehead, but even if I lived that long and could find someone who'd put up with the slaying and the history and the misery that is my life, I couldn't ever have a baby and bring it into this world. I'm stuck with this." She brought her hands to the side of her head, pressing hard. "And if someone, some *thing*, wants to love and take care of me, then I don't see why you can't suck it up and deal."

Her voice had suddenly gone from a shout to a whisper. She was crying now, tears trailing down her face and dripping from her chin. Her nose was running in an embarrassing fashion and she sniffed hard. "I don't care what your history is. I don't care how you feel about him. Accept him. He's gentle to me and he cares about what happens. When he's around and I let myself go just for a little while, I feel loved and normal. Neither one of us has any illusions about it. We both know it can't last. I didn't want to be with a vampire again. But I am. And if you cared even the tiniest speck for me, you'd shut your yap and let me try to deal with it knowing my friends were behind me."

Xander sat down hard on the bench by the window, hands in his lap. He nodded. "You're right. And Anya just hollered at me about pretty much the same thing." Then he laughed and looked up at her. Buffy's shoulders were sagging, but she didn't say anything. Didn't give in to him, the steel rebar of her will keeping her straight and strong in front of him. "I'm sorry. I didn't think about how... it's hard for me to want to share you with anyone but us, especially when it's someone I don't trust. But if you do, then I guess I should back you up."

"It's all about backup." Buffy sat down next to him, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of his T-shirt. Just as long as she didn't blow her nose on it.

"I'm sorry you're so lonely. I look at you and all I see is this incredibly beautiful woman who any guy in his right mind would want to be with and devote himself to. Kinda hard to remember that all you've been through since Riley left means you haven't been able to be with anyone. It's just... you don't love him, do you?"

"No. Well, sometimes I do. He's different when he's with me and Dawn. The guy who saved Dawn, that's what he's like most often. But it's not a mad pash kind of love. And Xander, no matter what, he is saving the world guy, now." Saving me guy, she thought sadly.

"Except that saving the world guy was preceded by killing your friends guy and manipulating people to their deaths guy."

"I know, Xander, I know. It's just... I think this is how he's changed. And you're forgetting he was saving the world guy before, too -- that time he helped me take on Angel and Drusilla. He never had to do any of this. He did it because he's different."

"Now he's got you believing that, too?"

"I didn't believe it until I really saw it." Remembering that night at the Bronze, the clarity of vision. To finally view him beyond the curtain of hate and fear and find light there. "Sometimes I don't trust my feelings, and that's usually a big mistake. I have the special Slayer Deluxe Edition of feminine intuition, and it says he's the real deal."

"For now."

Buffy brushed the hair from her forehead, and Xander was struck by the dark circles under her eyes. "I don't think either of us has any illusions that this will last or is something grander than it is. But he understands what I do, who I am, in a way no one else has for a long time."

Nodding, Xander said, "All right. As long as he's good to you." He took Buffy's hand. "This prophecy you keep talking about. What is it? You're starting to look like you might be trying to revive the heroin chic look here, and it's kinda scary."

"I don't know what it is. Probably nothing. I think I just can't get over what happened that night, and it's like it veered off in another direction from what it was supposed to be. That's all." Closing inside herself as always, the morning glory at night.

"Like PTSD?" Xander asked.

"Okay, that came from Tara and Willow, didn't it?" she asked, smiling bitterly.

"A little. But you think?"

"Maybe. I got a lot to sort through." She stood up and held her hand out to him. "Wanna wear the puffy suit? I feel like I could hit you a lot right now, might be cathartic for both of us."

"Can I hit you back?"

"You can try," Buffy taunted.

 

 

When she came to him that night, Buffy was silent and cool, stilled, a river frozen over so nothing moved beneath it. For a long time she simply sat across from him on a bench, her eyes drawn down from the weight of her life, filled with sadness. And Spike had no idea what to say, no way to move her to life, so he waited.

"Giles is leaving," she finally told him, ice-crusted voice crackling with tension.

"I know," Spike answered, looking at his hands. "Overheard him tell you."

Her eyebrows went up. "So now you're eavesdropping, too? You don't really go in for the scruples much, do you?"

"Well, I'd already done stalker and obsesso guy, and you know -- evil and so on."

"I'd heard that about you."

"Didn't want to say anything though. Reckoned you'd been hurting enough."

"He's not leaving for awhile, but I can't stand the thought..." She cried then, the ice thawing. Spike lunged across the room, scooped her up and held her so tightly he thought he might crush her. He let Buffy cry for a long time, just listening, holding her.

After a while Buffy quieted and brushed tears away from her face. She should be embarrassed to do this in front of him, but it had felt good, right. "Everyone knows now. About us, I mean."

"Yeah. Willow caught me leaving the other day. Told her nothing happened, but you'd blabbed to the estrogen house already so I looked like a prat. Again."

"I figured it was best. If I didn't tell them... the shock could be worse."

Smoothing her hair, he said, "Don't imagine anyone's taking it well, least of all the men."

"Bing, bing, bing! We have a winner for understatement of the year." Buffy ran her hand up under his shirt, over his stomach, hard and cool like marble under her fingertips. A sculpture of her own. He made a little noise in the back of his throat.

"Think the heavy mob will come with torches in the middle of the night and stake me?"

"Not a chance. Then they'd risk the wrath of the slayer. Think how unpleasant that could be."

"Actually, I do like thinking about that." He grinned at her as she moved up to kiss him. His mouth was open and inviting. After awhile he said wistfully, "Now that I have to behave myself, fantasizing about Harris and the watcher getting thumped by someone is as good as I can get."

"Less talk, more kissage," Buffy said. She pulled him back to her, unbuttoning his shirt and sliding it off his shoulders as they kissed. This being lost in someone's arms but not dwarfed by their size was pleasant. Spike wasn't that much bigger than she was, but he matched her strength deliciously and she could completely rely on his endurance.

They went downstairs to his bed. Spike stripped his jeans off, a bath of golden lamplight on his pale skin. Buffy traced her fingertips through the furrows of muscle down to his hard cock, pushing back the foreskin to expose the head, so smooth, already slippery with pearly liquid. Slowly, with aching tenderness, he took off her top, then her jeans and panties, kissing and stroking her. Her skin goosebumped in the cold of the room and against his heatless body.

They slid onto the bed wrapped in delirium, Buffy writhing against him. Her need to forget everything had brought her here, and Spike was doing just the right things to make her forget it all except the fire between her legs, the hard readiness of her breasts, the flavor of him on her mouth. The way he kissed her was reverential. He entered her, vapor into air, surrounding and filling her, unseen and silent. Perhaps this was what a vampire felt when he drank -- subsumed into someone else's essence. Absorbing their life.

Spike knew he couldn't last against her furious movements, the way she clawed and thrashed. He peeled one of her hands from his back, then the other, and slid himself deeper inside. As far as he could go without drinking from her, as close as he could get to her soul. Home now.

Holding her arms above her head, Spike pinned her birdlike wrists in his hand. Buffy braced him with her legs on either side as he thrust languidly inside her, watching the fathoms in her eyes deepen, shifting and changing. Breath left her parted lips, caressing his skin as she let him hold her there, trapped by something other than his strength. The soft heartbeat of her desire beneath him.

Then she held him tight with her thighs, held him on the edge of climax, forcing herself back in control before letting go and meeting him with her hips. He fell through a darkness dusted with stars that sparkled behind his eyes, finally opening them to see the twilight of her face as she smiled.

"I love you," Spike whispered against her throat, easing her arms down. They closed around him like angel's wings. Her pulse rang sweetly in his ears as he kept moving into her, still hard, waiting to hear the building catch of breath in her throat as she came.

"Yes," she said, hips bucking beneath his at last.

Spike clutched her tightly. Her answer was both invitation and submission. One word, allowance to her heart, invocation to this new being he was, made nearly human again by the simple act of loving her.

They lay together silently, her hands defining the geography his back, Spike afraid to say anything that would break this world she'd conjured for him into thousands of hard-glittering shards.

"Were you like this when you were alive?" she asked quietly, startling him.

"Like what?" Spike was afraid she'd say something brutal, remind him of his status.

"So loving." He froze, immobilized by the realization that she saw him that way.

"I... yes. Suppose I was. It was what led me here. How I met Drusilla \-- being in love. Wanting to love, but instead rejected. Dru saw that."

"I can't understand how you could--"

"Don't. I can't understand how *you* could either. Let's call it a draw, shall we?"

Buffy pulled him closer, head pillowed on her breasts. "Were you always with her? All that time?"

Trailing one finger down her arm, he watched her skin move under his fingertip, so alive, so human. Colored by blood and light. "For a long time. But she would drift away, sometimes for years. We would break apart and come together, like waves around a rock."

"I didn't know you were so poetic. Poetical?" It cut her, though, sharp and cold. He was so loyal in love... he would never move on from her. She would destroy him by being his for only this time.

He laughed low in his throat. "You have no bloody idea."

"Were there others?"

"Yeah."

"A lot? Lovers?"

"Sex was sex. Love was with Dru. I kept them apart."

"Humans?"

"Of many kinds."

Silence sharing space between them until she understood what that meant. Of course. If sex was just sex, it wouldn't matter who with. Vampires weren't large with the gender definitions.

"Would you... would it be separate now?"

"No, Buffy." His voice more serious than she'd ever heard it. "These rules are different."

His brittle shell, the thing that kept him apart from others, kept him hard and cold, was crumbling under her hands. Slivers of its thin pieces embedded in her skin. He was open to her now, she saw inside the shell, and it wasn't as ugly as she'd thought it would be. Could time and change wash away her effect on him, the way water washes away writing in the sand?

After Xander had left her at the Magic Box, Buffy had stayed in the training room waiting for Giles. He would want to dress her down for Spike, for everything, but he'd surprised her by only asking, "When you feel better, what then? If he's helping you now because you feel lost or traumatized, when you're all right, will you stop? There's no telling what he would do."

Of course everyone was afraid of that. Part of her was afraid of it, too. The intensity of Spike's feelings in any situation was never in question. "I don't think it will be that simple or that brief," she'd told Giles, but Buffy wasn't so sure. She was supposed to know love and forgiveness, but could the powers that controlled her destiny really have meant these feelings for a vampire? Especially this one?

"Spike," she whispered in his ear, the breath tickling him mercilessly. "Why me? Why would you love me?"

How did he tell her what he couldn't know himself, what he'd tortured himself over for so many months? His quiet stretched tautly through the air before he answered, voice thick with pain. "Because you were good."

"No, really," Buffy said, laughing. He liked the sound it made in her lungs. Pulling his head up to face her, he was met with lips that kissed his softly.

"It's true. No joke when I said my life was pathetic. I was just... miserable. Being a vampire gave me something I'd never had -- power. The evil in you, it wants to use the power. Destroy anything that works against you. And I know how you feel about that. Can't change who I was, only who I am now." He kissed her again. "But being stuck here after that chip, without power, I had to depend on simple human goodness. On you. Had to see you, really see you. Found I didn't want to kill that goodness in you; instead I loved it. Don't know why. Who ever knows why they love someone? It just happens."

"You were going to kill me the day you thought your chip was out."

Leaning above her on his elbows, he traced the perfect pink shell of her ear with his finger, then circled his arm around her head, twining his fingers in her hair. "Did you know that was the day I finally realized I loved you? If I'd got the chip out... still not sure I would have done it. Wanted to. I was so tired of you being inside me, always around me. It was like being choked to death. But I don't know that I could have gone all the way. If I'd tasted you... I don't know."

They were mute for awhile until she said, "I still want a normal life. This... we can't be normal. It can't last."

Spike shifted, turning over, and held her within his arms, the back of her head resting in the crook of his shoulder. "I know that." When he was alone with her he deluded himself that she would love him in the grand, passionate way she'd loved Angel. That she would want to transcend the limitations and peculiarities of their lives. But when he was in her regular world, with her family and friends, knowing what the future might hold for her, then he was burdened by the certainty of hopelessness. "You're unique, you know. Or maybe you don't know. Everything... your family, your friends, who's loved you. There's never been anyone like you."

"But I want to be like everyone else." Her bruised voice hurt him.

"Never happen," he said, kissing the top of her head. "You know, I was always a bit fascinated by you, even when I wanted to best you. One of the first things I did when I got here was to tape you to watch your fighting style. Used to watch it sometimes just to admire and to know, in the way you can admire an enemy."

"Okay, first? Ew. And second, more of the TMI. I really didn't need to know you'd been watching me on tape."

He slapped her lightly on the arm. "Idiot. Not that way. To study your technique."

"Look, you're the sweater thief and robot builder. Don't think I haven't been keeping a tally of your freakier behaviors."

"Glad to see you're at least thinking of me." Spike pulled her hand up, kissing the inside of her wrist. She'd wondered before why he loved her. How could anyone know that answer? It never happened because you thought of it, decided it. Just one day you looked at someone and suddenly the knowledge was there, in the flutter of their eyelid or the turn of their wrist. "As usual, Summers, you're missing my point. What I'm trying to tell you is that you'll never be normal, even if you weren't slaying. You're a superior creature. Slaying, being the Chosen One, all that did was bring it out where everyone could see it. And it's why anyone loves you."

And why he could never keep her, he knew. Spike spent too much time trying to order everything in his mind, imprint it there like a snapshot, because this was fleeting and someday she would be gone.

"What happens when we stop?" she asked, her tremulous voice betraying the fear she would probably always have of him no matter what he did to prove himself.

"Kill me. If you wouldn't, I'd make you." He'd seen enough of this world now. If she took her light away, then he belonged in eternal darkness.

Inside her throat there was a strangling noise. Her arms came up around his neck, pulling him forward so his face was next to hers. As she kissed Spike she slid against him, demanding with her body that he hold her as tightly as he could. They stayed that way until they fell asleep.

Buffy dreamt of holes in the sky, earthquakes and blue fire that consumed her, demons screeching through skies blackened with smoke, until she was startled into awakeness by Spike's hand on her arm. Hollering at her from a distance. Looking down at his hand, trying dully to understand what was happening, she realized she was completely naked and shaking, standing not far from his crypt.

"What the fucking hell are you doing?" he shouted at her again.

When she didn't answer he threw her over his shoulder firefighter-style and carried her inside and down the ladder, dropping her softly onto the bed. Then he picked up her clothes and started dressing her.

"Fucking hell, Slayer, fucking bloody hell. This has to stop. I'm taking you home. The witches are going to find a way to deal with this if you won't let us help you, or help yourself."

Buffy looked at him stupidly, realizing slowly that he was genuinely angry with her. The only response she had to his anger was to cry, and sobs ricocheted through her chest, the hiccups shaking her even harder as he slipped her top over her shoulders.

His face was contorted by anger and pain. For a moment he looked like he'd always looked to her before, a vampire, a dangerous, deadly vampire. That made her cry even harder.

Presently he stopped and looked at her. "Slayer. What is wrong? What is this thing that's driving you mad?"

"I was supposed to die that night. I told you," she said between gulping breaths. Words poured out of her faster than tears. "The first slayer, she talked to me in a vision, she said that death was my gift. I didn't understand it at first but that night, afterwards, I started to realize she was telling me a prophecy that my death would be the gift that kept Glory from winning and kept Dawn alive. I was supposed to die, and it screwed with the prophecy. You even said -- you can't fuck with a prophecy or it will come back and bite you later."

By the time she'd stopped Spike's fingers were digging into her upper arms in a way that meant he'd forgotten how strong he was. He shook her so hard her teeth snapped together and she almost bit her tongue. Face alight with anger, color in his skin that she hadn't seen except in full game-face, mouth twisted in a grimace. Fighting the vampire inside him, pushing it back into the dark depths of his being.

"Are you off your fucking head?" he bellowed. "You stupid twat. That's not a prophecy. A prophecy is something that's been sitting around moldering in a book somewhere on the shelves of some tweedy librarian like Giles. A seer--"

"Sears?" she sniffled.

Eyes rolled ceilingward, beseeching a greater power than was ever likely to help his wretched being. Spike made exasperated noises but loosened his grip. "S-e-e-r. Someone who looks into the future and sees what could transpire. It's something that's written down and then rots in the book for bleeding donkey's years until the right person finds it and the right person fulfills it. What you got was nothing but a useless fortune cookie. It could mean all sorts of things. That's all! Death was your gift -- could have gone either way, Slayer. You gave a gift to the world by saving it \-- through *her* death."

Her voice was harsh and bitter. "Then why do I keep having these dreams that I'm dying? Why do I sleepwalk and talk in my sleep? In my mind I see that tower and I know I'm dying."

"Things like that... the things she said to you and what you faced down. They have a way of affecting people. Maybe you just haven't dealt with it. And you probably feel guilty for Ben having to die, although why is beyond me, he was such a--"

Buffy broke his hold on her by snapping her arms out and hitting him with the sides of her hands. "Shut up." Color rose in her cheeks and she glared at him. Buffy grabbed her jeans and pulled them on, then her shoes. But Spike just fell back on the bed laughing at her as she dressed.

"Oh-ho, there's my little fireball. That's the slayer I know." He got up slowly and came to her, ignoring the blows against his chest and arms, catching her fist in his palm and shoving it back at her. "You're not going to take it now, are you? You'll fight it because that's what you do. That's the only way you'll conquer it."

She stopped hitting him as his arms circled around her. "I see myself," she whispered. "I'm falling into something... fire and lightning. I always die. If you see yourself die in a dream, aren't you supposed to really die?"

He held her tightly, his chin resting on her head. After all this time watching her battle this, yet not seeing what it really was, he finally understood. "Because you wanted to, didn't you? You wanted to finally stop carrying all the weight."

The years had built and built until they crushed her. All she'd wanted was to be free, to take that final burden and make it hers, leap off that tower into nothingness. Spike thought of the past few weeks, of her sad, haggard face as she got rid of her mother's things, of making that awful sandwich and of doing homework at night in between paying bills, of the mercurial teenager she was now mother to, and it all made sense. When he'd been offered the riches of power and immortality, the chance to stop carrying the weight of life, he'd leapt at the chance to slip the traces of the sad human world he'd been bound to; Buffy had finally seen a gift of freedom before her that night only to have it cruelly torn from her grasp at the moment of release.

Inside his arms she melted to him. Tension slackened, her weight grew heavier as he held her up. But she wouldn't answer him, and that was all the answer he needed.

"Fucking hell," he said almost inaudibly. "I am taking you home, and I won't tell them what you said, but you are going to let yourself be taken care of. Is that understood?" Holding her chin in his fingers, he tilted her face up. Her eyes glistened with tears. Spike kissed the salty trail of her pain down her cheek, a different kind of essence than blood to steal inside himself.

Buffy nodded.

"We're going to get through this." We, he thought wryly. When did there get to be a we? The universe was out of order.

When he'd got her home, they found Tara was up. She helped them upstairs without a word.

"Get some sleep, luv," Spike said, yanking the covers up over Buffy. Tara's air of quiet calm made him think they'd been expected.

"I'm not an invalid."

"No, but you haven't had a decent kip in weeks and you need to rest. When you wake up, you can do whatever you bloody like, I don't give a rat's arse. Unless it involves wandering about weaponless, in which case I put my foot down."

"I'm glad to see you're still the same charming evil guy we always knew and hated." She smiled at him when she said it, though. Spike would overreact if he thought she was dissing him.

"What'd I do now?"

"You called me a stupid twat. Back at your place. Like I was going to skip past that on rewind?" She ran her fingertips over his hand. "But very clever on the pissing me off." Buffy looked over at Tara and said, "He called me names so I'd get my back up."

Tara dropped her head and smiled, and then Spike got up, sliding his hand away.

He took Tara out of the room. "When Dawn and Willow are up, we need to get them on watch detail." He explained what he could, keeping mum about why Buffy was letting these visions consume her. "But it's down to you witches. You've got to find something that will ease her back out of this."

"It's funny," Tara said, brushing her hair out of her eyes. "I couldn't sleep. Finally I gave up because I kept thinking something important was happening. I didn't expect it to be... to be Buffy sleepwalking." Tara knew there was more than what he was saying, because Spike told her with his eyes, the nervous twitch of his body. He had no idea how transparent he was to her. It would offend him to know, but it wasn't a terrible thing, just that he was so much more uncomplicated than a human being. Everything was right on the surface, the id controlling all his actions, no underlayers to his essence. He just was, which made it far easier to read him. And these days he wore so much of his ghost heart on his sleeve that everything he felt was clear as glass.

"Aren't there things... there are things you can use for this, right?" Spike asked anxiously.

"Oh! Oh, yeah, of course. We can help her, I'm sure of it. It's almost like she's trapped in different dimensions, you know? Her mind is one place, and her body is another. But the part of her that's here... it wants to be free, doesn't it? Of this life?"

Spike gaped at her. "I'd ask how you knew that, but I probably wouldn't get it anyway. You figure that out before, or was I just the gormless one who couldn't suss it out till tonight?"

"No, you just told me, in your own way."

His head tilted to the side and his eyes opened wider. Tara could swear they sparkled with a life he didn't have. "I have to go, sunup's soon. Make sure Dawn knows not to leave her if you and Will run off to do your witchy errands. Be back by night."

"Probably you'll be pissed at me saying this, but you have a sweet side."

Drawing his lips together tightly, Spike shook his head. Then he smiled. "You spend a hundred years with a lunatic, you get the hang of how to talk to someone who's troubled."

He gave Tara's arm a squeeze, and for the first time she didn't flinch at contact with him. Things had changed so much now, she realized. They really were all a team, no matter what had happened in the past. She had no idea what the future held and what potential dangers a broken and grieving Spike could pose, but for now he was a part of them. As he walked down the stairs and out the door, coat swinging behind him with the rhythm of his cocky strut, she smiled. There could be moments inside all the pain of life that made you want to believe this world truly was a gift.

 

 

These days with all the Summers trauma and the Summers sexcapades, he never got enough sleep. Even during the day when Spike would normally rest, he'd pace and worry, his concerns for Buffy overshadowing his usual patterns.

But this time exhaustion got the best of him and he fell asleep in front of the TV, completely comatose until he heard Dawn shouting at him in that high-pitched scream that could peel wallpaper off. Not sure where he was. The sound seemed to be playing over and over. Is it live, or is it Memorex? He leapt out of the chair, head groggy, fists up, ready for a fight. But it was just Dawn, panting.

"Spike! It's Buffy! She's gone!"

It took him a moment to get what she was saying. "Gone? What d'you mean? I told you to keep an eye on her!"

"I was! I did! We were there all day talking to her and finding out what happened and all. Willow and Tara went to the Magic Box to get Giles and some stuff to give Buffy that would make her feel better and we were just sitting on the couch watching TV and then I got up to make her some tea and when I came back she was gone!"

Spike squinted at her, trying not to let his exasperation show, but for a brief moment he wanted to smack her hard. She was looking at him helplessly, the same way she'd looked at him that night on the tower, and it brought out all the anger and resentment again.

"I can't believe you... Oh, balls. Look, we haven't time for this. Did she take weapons?"

"She didn't take anything. She was barefoot and wearing sweats and a T-shirt. Where would she go? We have to find her!" Now she was getting hysterical, and Spike could not abide hysterical women. It was tempting to smack her like in the movies, see if it worked, but he didn't relish his head exploding.

"It's dangerous for her to be out if she doesn't know what she's doing," he snarled, putting his coat on. "Demons, they get wind of this, she's toast." He grabbed a crossbow out of the trunk and a few other nasty toys, and turned to Dawn. Her lower lip was trembling, the guilt turning her into a big teary blob. "Stop it, Niblet. I know where she's gone."

"You do?" Dawn wiped her hands across her eyes.

"The tower. It's the in place round town these days, you know." He grabbed her hand and went for the door. "The only trouble is, she wants to throw herself off it because she thinks she was supposed to. And if we're too late..."

That earned a huge hiccuping sob.

"Get yourself together. She's going to need you." He narrowed his eyes as they got outside. "Bloody good timing at least. Sun's setting and if I stay in the shade..."

He hauled her along, knowing she couldn't run as fast as he could without help. For a moment he considered getting the car, but they could run the distance in a town this small just as easily, and it was parked across the cemetery, anyway. Have to do some better emergency planning in future if he was going to keep hanging with the crisis crowd.

They ran and ran, Dawn flagging as they got closer, until Spike saw something coming out of the alley they were running through. If he looked to the south he could see the tower looming above the warehouse buildings down there. But they had an impediment now. Vampires, a lot, coming towards them. And oddly, one of them looked familiar. Spike shoved Dawn behind a Dumpster. "Stay there. Don't come out until I tell you."

"Spike," she hissed, "we have to get Buffy."

Why did everyone always state the obvious to him? Did they think he was that thick?

He looked around. "There's four of them. You're tasty. You think they're going to let us just skip on down the road?" He pushed her hard and she stumbled back, alarmed by his roughness.

The tall vampire leading them didn't just looked familiar. In a booming voice touched with a Nordic accent he said "Spike! It really is you. What a surprise!"

It took a moment, but Spike finally remembered. Long, nearly endless winter nights in Scandinavia where you could roam for hours feeding at will, not fearing the sunlight. The welcoming people, hearths cozy and inviting, asking you in. Giving up their warmth to you.

"Jens! What the bleeding hell brings you here to the land of palm trees and sunshine?"

Jens held his hands out. "A Hellmouth! What brings anyone here? Heard this was the place for all manner of trouble." He came closer, but stayed far enough away that Spike couldn't raise the crossbow without calling attention to it. And with four of them, he wouldn't have time to reload quickly enough. "I'd also heard," Jens continued, "that you'd gone soft and were palling around with the slayer. Now, I hadn't thought that could possibly be the Spike I knew, but... who's that little slip of a girl you're hiding back there?"

Dawn whimpered. Oh God, oh God, they were going to die before they could save Buffy and it would be so lame; the rescuers who got killed trying to rescue. She had great faith in Spike, but four against one! Buffy would kill her if she tried to take out a vamp, but this hardly seemed like a winnable fight without help. They'd dust Spike and then come after her. If she died, Buffy would murder her. And Spike was so conversational... what if he was willing to give her up to them, make new vampire friends so he could feed again with their help?

Oh God! Her heart was pounding so hard she choked.

Spike rubbed his hand over his forehead. "Well, you see, it's really a lot more complicated than that, Jens." He brought the crossbow up then and fired it straight into the heart of the vampire on the far left, threw it on the ground, and with a quick movement broke off part of a crate, hurling the splintered end with swift accuracy so it landed in the center of another vampire's chest. Both of them exploded into dust. After a moment's hesitation Jens leapt forward towards Spike, fangs out. He was at least a foot taller than Spike, enormous in girth and height, but that allowed Spike to duck under him, jump up, and land both feet on his back. Jens pivoted and rushed Spike, but Spike kicked him again in the knees, buckling them. As Jens grabbed at him, Spike plunged the other arrow into his chest.

"And I really haven't got time to explain," he said as Jens disappeared in a cloud, screaming. "Got to see about a girl." Spike whirled, ready to take on the next vamp. He wiggled his fingers, beckoning, and bounced back and forth from one foot to the other. Apparently the remaining vampire seemed to think better of it and turned tail down the alley.

Dawn watched him run, letting out air after holding her breath the whole time. She could pee her pants right now, she was so scared. Everyone had been telling her for months how scary Spike was but she'd never seen him fight, not really. Not take on four vamps like he was the freaking Tasmanian Devil.

His intensity was frightening and his vamp face made the peroxided hair seem scarier somehow, not just punk cool. He'd made a motion with his tongue, a leering gesture, that completely wigged Dawn. There was a power in him and a fearlessness, a rage she'd never seen before. With complete insight she knew just why Buffy had been so afraid of him, why they all had such a hard time letting go of the past.

Still with his fang-face on, he held out his hand to her. "Come on, we've got places to be." Aiugh! her brain screamed and did a spazzy jerk. She stepped backwards.

Even behind his animal face he looked wounded. Quickly he de-vamped, talking to her softly, still holding his hand out.

"Sorry, Popsicle. Didn't mean to scare you."

"No," she lied, grabbing his hand. "You didn't, I just... I've never seen you like that before." They ran down the alley, through another one.

"You knew him?" Dawn asked, grimacing.

"Yeah. Old pal. Danish footballer... or... no, something else, before he was turned. Never was very clever."

"You need better friends."

"Oh, you mean like you?" She stuck her tongue out at him but his back was turned to her.

Finally they got to the tower. Buffy was nowhere in sight, but it creaked and swayed. Spike looked up.

"She's up there, I can smell it." He turned to her. "Can you do it? Can you go up there again? She'll never come to me."

Dawn nodded. "I can do it. But you have to come with me." They began climbing as the wind whipped around them furiously. "You... you can actually smell someone from far away?"

"You want me to answer that in detail?"

"No!" Gross. As if. "No, it's just... kinda creepy."

"So everyone likes to remind me."

Buffy heard them coming for her. She didn't know who it was, but she could hear them. A part of her wondered if it might be the first slayer, come to claim her forever. Maybe Glory. But no, they were gone for good.

Around her the sounds of thunder and fire roared even though the sky was clear. One step and she could be free of it. Death a gift to her at last. For all the times she'd saved the world, finally a chance to rest, to be at peace.

She knew what Spike had been saying to her, that it wasn't a prophecy and she had to die. But none of it addressed whether she *should* die. They could carry on without her. She could be with her mother, and someday, maybe Angel. When his atonement was complete, and they could walk in light together.

The tower shifted. Perhaps if she stayed here long enough, it would collapse in the wind. Then this wouldn't even come down to an effort on her part. Exposed like this, alone, waiting -- it seemed as if her whole life had built to one moment. Would anyone even know or care that she was gone besides her small circle of friends? The world went on even when you sacrificed everything for it. It didn't care what you gave to it. Still the world asked you to save it, but gave you no reward except pain and misery and loss. Death was no gift, not to her, not from her.

Behind her came the sound of clattering feet, but she didn't turn. Then Dawn's voice.

"Buffy," she called, like a thousand times before. Rescue me. Help me. Save me. As if that was the only thing she had to offer anyone. "It's me. And Spike's here."

Buffy didn't turn around, just continued to stare down at the city below her, the one she'd saved so many times. What would have happened if she'd never come here? Would Glory's plan have succeeded eventually, simply because there was no one powerful enough to keep the Key from her? Or would any of it have transpired at all? Maybe the Master would have risen or Spike would be running the show with Dru. She could still have been in Los Angeles, living her normal life. Anywhere but here.

"Buffy, you have to come down. If you're awake and can hear me, we have to get you down from here."

I'm awake, Buffy thought. Awake, conscious, alive, here. But I don't want to be.

Dawn stepped toward her. It must have killed her to walk up here. What was Spike thinking, dragging her up top like this? Suddenly Buffy turned.

"I'm awake," she said, but the wind carried away her words. She put her hand up to stop Dawn, but Dawn kept walking gingerly towards her.

"Buffy, please, come down. Please let us help you. I can't lose you."

What would you do, Buffy wondered, if you did lose me? In the long run, would it matter?

"Buffy, I love you. I need you. We all love you." Dawn was only a foot in front of her now. The tower jerked hard, jolting them. As she tried to maintain her balance, Dawn's foot slipped and she yelped.

Spike made as if to come towards them, but Buffy said "Don't." He stopped, looking at her quizzically. Everyone wanted something, even Spike. But at least he gave something back.

Buffy turned and looked over her shoulder at the city below them. Had her dreams been telling her this was the answer? Maybe she had misunderstood. Maybe there was no answer. The first slayer's words had been open to interpretation. I'm supposed to give and forgive. Myself. No one else.

Then she turned back to Dawn and said, "It's all right." It was. It could be. She stepped forward as Dawn took her hand, pulling her towards the stairway. Buffy squeezed her hand as they walked.

She didn't look at Spike as they started to descend. He came up behind them, guarding them, which amused Buffy. When they reached the ground he put his hand on her shoulder. Finally Buffy turned her face up to him. "I feel so empty of the things I'm supposed to have. Isn't that why I'm supposed to be here? Because I'm empty and have to give my life to show love?" She started to cry. Letting herself die would be taking, not giving. Taking their love with her.

"No, you're bloody well not," he barked. "You're full of love. Don't you even see that, you nitwit? It pours out of you like sweat, like blood from a cut." Buffy looked at him sharply. How could he know to say those words that belonged to the first slayer? Had she said them in her sleep? "You give the world a gift every fucking day by taking care of it. If that isn't love, then I don't know what is."

Dawn's eyes were huge as she watched Buffy, tears in the corners threatening to overspill.

Spike heard a noise behind them. The witches and the watcher. Good. He needed them to take the girls home, let him take care of business.

Giles reached them first, out of breath, clearly scared to death. But he stopped and looked at Spike, then at Buffy, back again to Spike. Knowing, possibly, what was really happening.

"It's over," Spike said. "Take her home."

Willow put her arm around Buffy's shoulder and Dawn took her arm. Spike turned away from them and they stopped, watching. He found a lead pipe and picked it up, hefting it in his hands, twirling it around. Nice and solid. He looked up at the tower, its cold blue steel and iron shining bleakly in the sodium lights. The demon overtook his features and he snarled low in his throat. "Get out of here, now."

As they left he hit one of the bottom struts as hard as he could. It cracked one of the footings, the blow reverberating up his arms, into his head, with a nice satisfactory chill. So he continued to hit it, moving around its base, weakening it, letting the wind help him. Until he finally heard the heavy groan of the left side starting to go. "Useless, evil, piece of shit," he bellowed, landing one last blow, and this time the groan turned into a scream as the metal bent, inexorably, slowly crumpling. Spike ran as fast as he could down the street for blocks until he heard the crashing start. He turned to watch it fall like a house of cards, buckling into a stack of useless scrap.

 

 

When he got to the Summers house they were all there, even Xander and Anya. The girls were upstairs fussing over Buffy, putting her in some decent clothes and making her feel comfortable.

Spike helped himself to a beer while Giles made a half-hearted apology to him, grumbling the whole time.

"He's trying to say thank you without actually having to thank you. It implies you have a more important position with Buffy than he does," Anya said helpfully. Xander coughed into his glass.

Staring off in the middle distance, Spike said, "She's more fragile than anyone seems to understand." He looked at Giles at last. For a moment Giles thought there was a flash of humanity in Spike, something that showed a greater concern for someone else's welfare than for his own. Empathy. He didn't like the idea of turning Buffy over to Spike for everything from training to heart-to-heart talks, but it looked as if that was the way things were going to go now.

"So, where's Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, then?" Spike asked as Willow came down the stairs.

"They're coming." She looked from Giles to Spike to Xander, wondering if they had been behaving themselves.

"So," Xander said conversationally, "You helped save Buffy yet again. Just *think* of the mileage you can get out of this one."

"No, she saved herself." Spike glowered at them.

"I suppose this means," Xander glanced at Giles for confirmation, "that we have to get used to you, like we did with Angel."

Spike worked his jaw a little, narrowing his eyes. Willow could feel the agitation fill the air like ions, and her eyes darted nervously around the room. "She likes a little monster in her man. It's a part of who she is. If you don't like it and don't believe it you can always trade Angel and me for a vampire to be named later. Because it'll probably just happen again."

Xander grinned maliciously. "Better the devil you know, at least."

"You're one to--"

"Enough!" Willow barked. They both shut up and looked at her. "This is about Buffy and taking care of her now, and making sure she's through this." She pointed at Xander. "You! Suck it up. Spike's a part of Buffy's life by her choice, and you're just going to have to deal with it if you want to be her friend. Don't make this harder for her."

Willow saw Spike smirking triumphantly at Xander and pointed at him. "And you, id-boy! You're just going to have to deal with the fact that Buffy's our dearest friend and we were here before you were. You are going to get along, or so help me, I'll turn you both into dung beetles." She made her resolve face, which she knew Xander would get, although whether Spike understood the danger he was in she wasn't sure.

"So. Okay. If you're really going to be part of our lives, have you ever given any thought to doing something... semi-legitimate?" Xander asked.

"What, you mean like a job?" Spike snorted. "Hardly."

"Oh yeah, because Buffy, she's going to like you keeping up with the evil schemes and the underworld lifestyle and all. You need money. The way you get it now, that's not going to sit with her after awhile. How much stealing do you think she'll put up with?"

Spike knew that was true, even though he didn't want to give points to Harris for anything. "What, precisely, would I do that was more acceptable? Work at Doublemeat Palace?"

Willow was getting excited. "You could be like a detective or something, pick up cases that the cops ignore because they're so stupid here, or that no one else would take because of the whole supernatural thing. Oh! 'cause like, you have the contacts in the evil underground, you're reasonably clever, you've got vampire senses and power... and you know some magic stuff, I've seen that. More than you let on. "

"And be like bleeding Angel with his whole help the hopeless incompetents twaddle? I don't think so!" Why did no one understand that he didn't want to be anything remotely like Angel, ever?

Xander smiled cruelly. "But Buffy loved Angel, and it's that whole helping people thing she goes for."

Spike narrowed his eyes. "All right, that's a point, I'll grant you."

"No, it could be so cool!" Willow said. "I bet there's lots of people with weird things happening that only someone who really knows this stuff could figure out. I mean, this is a Hellmouth! All kinds of action and adventure for a vampire who can't hurt people and wants to do right by his lady. And then, like, if there has to be slaying of any kind, well... you and Buffy could work together even more!"

"It would be very cinematic," Anya commented, "the demon private eye and the beautiful slayer. Or like that show on Sci-Fi Channel, about the vampire police detective. You could drive around at night in a classic car, and be wryly charming to all your clients."

"I'll think about it," Spike said evenly, not wanting to give them anything to go on, but he had to admit, the idea did appeal. Still get in a spot of violence now and then, help the slayer and remain part of her life, but mostly give him something to do since the chip had pretty much removed fuck-all of his existence. Yet it seemed suspicious, them trying to find some way to help him.

"We're not... setting you up," Tara said. "We're not playing a joke on you. I think it's a cool idea, sort of."

He smiled at her kindness. "Could be, yeah." He thought of Buffy's comments about the first slayer, about giving and forgiving. Some of this bunch could do that. Maybe that's what marked you as human, being able to forgive. If he wanted to be part of the human world again for Buffy and for Dawn, then he had to give, too. "I like it," he said, nodding at Willow and Xander. Even Giles was looking sort of interested, less sour.

Behind them they heard footsteps as Buffy and Dawn came down to join them. Buffy seemed at peace now, he could see it in her, light again in her eyes after darkness for so long.

For a while they all sat around munching on really bad nachos that Xander had made, talking about Giles's plans for England. Giles watched Buffy and noted how much more at ease she appeared. Maybe he really could leave her, after all. His life would seem so much emptier, he knew, but even with this crisis now passed she'd come through it on her own and with Spike's help. Perhaps she would never be truly loving to Spike, but she appeared more comfortable, maybe even happier, when she was with him. Stranger things had happened.

After a long night the others drifted away to homes or to bed, and it was just Spike with Buffy. When the last friend had left, Buffy turned off the lights and sat down on the couch next to Spike, who was hunkered down into the cushions. It taxed him to be around everyone and be personable.

"So, once again, you save me."

"Rubbish. I didn't save anyone."

"No, of course not. You don't keep saving the world, or me, or Dawn..."

"Really, you can quit banging on about it at any time. And don't go making googly-eyes at me like I'm your big hero. I had enough of that with kid sis, and frankly, it's embarrassing."

"You know, I know who you are. You can quit with the bovver-boy act."

He arched an eyebrow at her and smirked.

Rolling her eyes, Buffy said, "Oh, please, like I haven't been nearly living with an Englishman for the past five years. I do pick up a few things, you know. Spike. I have to warn you. There's no real reward. You do the work, but... bupkus on the tips."

His eyes in the low light were stormy and mysterious. "I already have my reward."

She snuggled next to him. He eyed her sideways, suspicious and amazed. Then she did the most extraordinary thing -- she took his hand and held it in her lap, as if they were sweeties snuggling after homework. Buffy relaxed against him and he tightened his grip around her tiny hand, closing his eyes, absorbing the texture of her skin through his. They sat that way for a very long time, not speaking, just listening to the sounds of the night through the open window, watching the curtains flutter in the breeze and the light from the moon shift through the living room as it passed by.

"I'm not going to get in the habit of rescuing you," he said crossly, breaking the silence. "I've changed, but I don't want to be just hanging about like Mighty Mouse, expected to swoop in and save the day every time you get some foolish notion in that very blonde head of yours. I've had enough of barmy women to last me a lifetime. Is that understood?"

Buffy laughed, a sweet little music note he didn't hear often enough. "Understood," she agreed, and put her head on his shoulder. "But you're stuck with us."

"Am I?" he asked, checking the runaway emotions as best he could. There were truths in here between them, great dark beasts. Scary ones. "Stuck with you." The possibilities of her answer terrified him.

"For now." She moved closer to him, nearly in his lap. "And anyway. You're really crappy at this, you know."

"What?"

"Being grouchy. This big bad thing. It's not working anymore. You keep messing it up by being good."

"Take it back or I'll bite you, and damn the consequences. Wait till I see that shaman and get this chip done. Then we'll see who's good."

"How you do talk." Buffy knew there an element of truth to what he was saying. He'd made the best of a bad situation for himself and he'd given up everything he loved -- no matter how loathsome Buffy herself found it -- just so he could love her and be with her.

A long time ago, when she was still so full of hate for him, he'd said that he was love's bitch. And he hadn't seemed ashamed of it, either. The way he'd pegged her and Angel, how he knew things about all of them they didn't know about themselves, showed he was more focused on emotions and affections than most humans she knew. There was still a long way to go to adjust to him in her life like this. But at least she knew there was a road ahead of them to walk.

As he leaned over to kiss her ear, she felt the sweet tingling of desire start slowly in her belly. Buffy closed her eyes, letting the sensation of his tongue tracing along her ear take over her mind. Sightlessly turning, offering her mouth to his, bringing him into her. Then his hand was on her breast, her own hand sliding in just under the waistband of his jeans. Eventually she drew her mouth away, opening her eyes to his, blue like a sky full of promise.

His lips were moist with their kisses. Buffy traced her fingers over the sharp outline of his cheekbones, the blade of his jaw.

"No matter what happens in the future, no matter how bad or ugly things get, just know that right now, you're beautiful to me," she whispered. He closed his eyes, and the way his shoulders dropped signaled to her his complete surrender. Buffy moved astride him, fingers snaking through his short, curly hair. His kisses were liquid and cool, running through her like a stream down to her toes.

Quivering, voice shaking, Spike stopped her and said, "We can't. Someone... we shouldn't, not here."

"No one will come down. They know we're here, they'll leave us alone."

"Buffy." Spike shook his head at her foolishness. There was something wrong when he was the sensible one.

"I need you. Inside me. A part of me."

She fell backwards and Spike gazed at her lying on the couch before him, her hair a tangle of flax and earth, eyes like a lion's, golden and feral. Lips sweet and soft like a ripe fig. Spike slid her sweatpants off slowly, then her panties. When she lifted her hips for him, he shivered with want. His fingers slid along her clit as she quivered, then dipped inside her beautiful warm wetness. Buffy's sure hands pulled him by the belt closer to her. Unbuckled the belt, opened the fly, and tugged at his jeans.

He entered her slowly, watching her face as she closed her eyes, the way her mouth parted to let her soft gasps out. Entering a heaven he was forbidden, the human inside him awakened and alive again each time they made love. Buffy's hands traced along his back following the bones of rib, scapula, hip. Thrusting deeper, his hips met hers push for push, her breathing becoming shallow until he felt her shudder beneath him.

Spike continued to move into her, his mind awash with golden light, until he climaxed and she held him in her arms as he flew down from this dizzying height.

 

 

It took her a few days to regain her equilibrium, but back in school, Buffy felt like she was finally getting her game back. The homework was tough but Willow and Tara helped out, and it gave her a chance to be closer to Dawn sometimes, the two of them studying together in the evenings before she had to go out patrolling.

One day, an average day, she was struck with the thought that maybe no one had a normal life. Or at least, not the kind of normal life she'd come to idealize, had desired since destiny knocked down her front door. Maybe this was the normalest she would get. Few slayers had lived this long and passed into adulthood. Even fewer had had family, friends, school. Kendra had been more typical than either Faith or Buffy, having trained for her calling, her whole being focused on the potential of duty. Buffy was an anomaly, her close family and support relationships almost unheard of.

You couldn't go around telling everyone you were destined to save the world from the forces of darkness. So your life became necessarily private, lonely. Yet Buffy was the least lonely slayer she'd read about.

That was the tricky part of being responsible for the world, of course: the thanklessness and the loneliness. But truly, Buffy knew, she wasn't alone. Love enveloped and filled her.

When she got home that evening she ate dinner with Willow, Tara, and Dawn, then did the mundane chores that now filled her life. Willow and Tara had gone out to the movies; Spike had come over because he always came over and nobody minded. Carrying a basket of clothes, Buffy stopped on her way to the laundry room to watch Spike arguing with Dawn over a poem she was reading for class. The words wanker and hack kept coming up, and Buffy smiled despite herself.

Maybe, she thought, this really was what life was supposed to be like, at least for her, and her picture of normal would never fit. No glass slipper that matched her foot alone. And maybe that's what the first slayer had been telling her.

Buffy was surrounded by demons and witches and conjurers and vampires, but this was real life for a slayer. She could forge strength and beauty from it, grow in the way a flower can grow in the cracks of ugly, broken pavement.

If death was her gift it could mean many things. The death of something like Glory was Buffy's gift to the world, and maybe someday, her own death would be a gift, too, when it was needed. This was an open-ended destiny; she saw that now. It was based on what the world asked of her and what she was willing to give to it.

Spike looked up then and caught her watching them; he tilted his head to one side and his face softened as if he understood what she was thinking. Knew that at that moment she was envisaging a new future, one that grew, Phoenix-like, from the remnants of her suffering.

Buffy gazed back at him and then turned to go downstairs. Life was about learning, about fitting it all together. Understanding the lessons. Death might be a gift. But love was one, too, and trust and forgiveness. She knew now that she had enough of all those things to share.

**Author's Note:**

> For Merry, with thanks for all the encouragement.


End file.
